I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents.
Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities.
These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile."
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system."
I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons.
Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught.
It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete.
A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders.
In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom.
This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
> school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
"school as the institution taking care of those kids"
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
It's exactly these low performers who never study, are always late, interrupt, and bully who make school living hell for the neurodiverse students that actually try. They can go into a coal mine and move piles of rocks for the rest of their lives for all I care as long as they can no longer disrupt everyone else.
In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
Some of these failing school systems (Baltimore, MD & Prince George’s County, MD) have some of the highest budgets per pupil in the country. The problem isn’t money.
> The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most.
Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
You are correct, but there are going to be cases where the help should come in the form of UBI or NIT. Otherwise people on the unfortunate end of the ability spectrum are going to have to get gainful employment somehow.
We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.
* remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning.*
This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong.
There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
“Remedial” was for the kids who disrupted class, started fights, were frequently absent. I am saying that the kid who was making a decent effort no matter how incompetent they were, was kept at the standard level.
The theory behind this is NOT that the poor students will become productive and valuable members of society.
It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
I'm going to repeat some stuff I said in a sibling comment, but OP mentions students who actually set $#!+ on fire at their school, and the only semblance of correctional action for this serious, criminal behavior was five days(!) of in-school suspension. No mention of police being seriously involved, as would be entirely proper given these circumstances. This is emphatically not how you'd try to save these kids from a life of crime; it has the exact opposite effect.
The word "worthwhile" was a poor choice — you're probably intending to talk about economics, about the price someone's labor might justify in the future. But it sounds like you're talking about transcendent moral value, because that's what we associate with the term "worth." Hopefully you don't actually mean to say that lesser academic ability equates to lesser import as a human being.
> the effort in takes to turn those kids into someone worthwhile
Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now.
Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
A productive education system should dedicate resources to students equally with voluntary options for students who perform outside the norm. That means not disproportionately dedicating resources to students who fail aside from tutoring outside class. Some students just deserve to fail. It is better find that out early instead of lying to children that everything is great and kicking the can down the road to the shock of adulthood.
Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
I believe a large portion of HN visitor got their lunch money stolen and toys broken by these loser kids. Bullied kids grow up to despise bullies, and bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with being a poor student
Where I went to school, they put all of the effort into the kids who were failing and if you were doing well, you got no help because hey you seem to be doing ok.
Results?
The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
There are also many, less intuitive reasons why continued commitment over time on the student's part is critically important. A student who is not sufficiently committed to her education might manage to "cram" for a test (often with strenuous, even painful effort!) and perhaps pass it, but then not put any attention into reviewing what she has learned, which sets her up to fail later when she will be expected to be familiar with that content and tackle new material that depends on it. It can be a self-sustaining cycle of failure.
That’s because there is greater ROI now in the population being productive. There is no utility in marginalizing anyone anymore.
The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all.
If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.
From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote:
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
Regarding the first quote, it’s not the opposite of what you’d expect if teaching was a low-status profession that could only attract weaker, lower paid labourers.
Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. He’d made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sons’ math teachers sucked. There’s absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the needing them to be lucky enough to not need to care about money.
I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions.
We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.
The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.
The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.
The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.
You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
Call me surprised that a foundation that wants to kill public schooling says public school teachers are overpaid.
Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
"Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries."
I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
Teaching (in Australia, but the pattern in the US is similar although lower[0]) is known to have okay starting pay that doesn't scale with experience. I'd expect some interesting effects around tenure, because those who leave or enter teaching probably do so when they're at the start of their career, when their pay is most competitive.
> The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom.
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Its refreshing that there is somewhere left on the internet where someone can point out that a problem might have nuance and not get immediately down voted to oblivion. HN is great.
You say “until we are dominated by idiot majority” as if it hasn’t happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.
> We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state.
Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.
I fear I am feeding a political tangent here, but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be fixed in the US by recognizing (admittedly this would be a timely process) an official third electoral party. It's a lot easier for nuance to prevail when the system isn't designed to be binary.
Teachers (or their unions) often lead the charge for the very policies that hinder performance. Some of these are done in the name of equity (local metro school districts are a prime example).
Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.
Average salary for teachers is $63k, across all states. In NY or CA, it is about $85k [1]. This does not include benefits (e.g., health care or a ~$50k/y pension for retirement at age 60 [2])
And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).
Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.
Teachers are well paid in Canada, and in many Canadian mid sized cities a teacher with 10 years experience will make more than a software developer with similar years experience. Additionally they have a strong pension, and incredible job stability.
e.g. A teacher in Saskatoon would make about $92K with 10 years experience with a defined benefit pension, and 2 months off in the summer.
It is tougher for teachers in high COL cities like Toronto and Vancouver as they make roughly the same as they do in the rest of the country. (But similarly a Vancouver software developer doesn't get a USA west coast salary)
Eh, I know a teacher in my state that is paid more than I am as a software dev, and that's not too unusual (I know other states might be different as we are in the top 10 for teacher salary). We also spend $14k per student per year at my district. The education is ok.
I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (like for DIY repairs), and logic or philosophy of argument classes? It would also be good to teach the basics of civics since a substantial portion of the population can't pass the citizenship test.
Most states in the US require a civics class in high school (normally called us government). Several states require personal financial literacy class. DIY is not one I know anywhere requiring.
But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.
Are they grossly underpaid? I don't think that's necessarily true. I think it's true in rural areas, but Chicago Public School teachers are paid above-average, and suburban Chicago teachers make as much as Chicago-area software developers do. And that's without taking into account defined-benefit pension plans and huge amounts of vacation time.
I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.
There are several subtleties when comparing teacher’s pay. First it’s 10 months not twelve so you need to adjust for that.
Second the pay also usually includes retirement benefits that can pay you 100% off your salary after 30 years. This is hard to compare to private industry since 401ks have replaced pensions. This is probably worth 2-5m when mature, and is accounted for in their pay. I think this is the biggest issue, since private employers pay higher expecting you to invest in your retirement.
Benefits are also usually good with small if any employee contribution. Probably worth a few hundred dollars a month.
It’s almost impossible to lose your job teaching. It has a factor of security that does not exist in private industry.
Pay raises are automatic. Primarily it’s based on years of service and level of education.
I’ve run the numbers previously and it starts seeming fairer, but due to the retirement impact it makes buying a home in the Bay Area almost impossible.
Would someone just starting their career in 2021 in the Chicago area get defined-benefit pension plans? Also, does a new teacher get as much as a new software developer? The $80k/year numbers that I keep seeing thrown around often apply to teachers with 20 or more years of experience, but software developers that level of experience make a lot more.
In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).
It has basically become a political talking point. My aunt is in rural Ohio making 80k per year as a HS history teacher. She is tenured but money wasn’t ever a struggle for her.
> Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards
Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run?
Seems technocratic and anti-democratic.
The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools.
Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being directed by the community, not by education insiders?
The problem with civilian control of schools is that it leads to asinine arguments over things like whether to teach sex ed at all or whether creationism belongs in the science classroom. Even in less extreme examples, it will lead to parents pushing for counterproductive and unnecessary reforms that make sense to the layman.
In the military, there are civilians at the top. Right below them, it's career military. Having these standards set by involving parents at a local level is ripe for disaster. As is having local sheriffs, without proper training, elected but I digress. Curriculums should be as standardized as possible. That makes everything comparable.
It would be enough to have have the top brass of education elected. You can even make the curriculum part of election campaigns.
Teacher salaries are public in my state (every state?) so I just looked up my local school. For the record, this is a rural location in Minnesota - each grade has a little over 100 students.
My wife’s sister is 33 years old and has worked there for a few years. Her yearly salary is $47,000, and has been rapidly increasing each year - nearly 10% a year. It looks like teachers that I would guess are in their 40s and 50s are capped out at about $74,000 a year.
That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.
Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.
My understanding is that salaries depend on location of the workplace and the surrounding housing market (aka. rich district = above-average-pay teachers).
Just get rid of school boards altogether. Here in Canada we only have 5 ballot questions across our 3 elections:
Federal representative
Provincial representative
Municipal representative
Mayor
School board trustee.
The PM? Head of the party with the most seats. Same with provincial premiere. Judges, crown attorneys, controllers, senators, the governor general, etc? Those are all appointed by our elected representatives.
A central ethos of Canadian governance is that our representatives are there to make decisions and bouncing questions to the public is a tool of last resort.
With that on mind, why the hell do we have elected school boards? We have a provincial ministry that runs education. We have municipalities that manage land-use.
Voters are basically flying blind in trustee elections. There are no debates, no media coverage, no political parties, just a list of names. If they don't happen by your doorstep, you don't get to know who these people are... And even if they do, you've only got their word to go on.
Ax this anachronistic institution and let the education policy professionals within the state/provincial government and school boards do their jobs.
In Australia the only elections regarding school are for the parent representatives on school council, which is local to an individual school, and sets some amount of strategic direction, but overall, doesn't do a lot. Curriculum & testing decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats at the state or federal level. We also don't elect judges, DAs, etc. We just elect politicians; they are ultimately responsible for making sure their respective public servants are doing the will of the people. You could argue the US system is more democratic, and yet most such systems in the US seem to be broken (from an outside perspective), while here they are not (there are certainly problems mind you).
Any perspective how these things work in countries that have a well-regarded, high performing education system, like Finland (apart from having well-trained, highly regarded, and highly trained teachers with a large degree of autonomy)?
How about attach the money spent on a school to the child, and let the teachers/administrators compete just like everything else. You can create specialized roles, pay more, focus on X, whatever you want.
The school system is a failing monopoly that should be broken up.
This has been used successfully in long-term care. The concept is called "Money Follows the Person."
Money Follows the Person (MFP) Rebalancing Demonstration is part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to assist U.S. states, in collaboration with stakeholders, to make widespread changes to their long-term care support systems. This initiative will assist states in their efforts to reduce their reliance on institutional care, while developing community-based long-term care opportunities, enabling the elderly and people with disabilities to fully participate in their communities.
It seems education in most first world countries is heading the same way, teacher authority being undermined by weak administration. It should be the case that education standards are protected by strong administration, bothnto hold teachers accountable, and to let them do the job without pandering to helicopter parents.
School choice would go a long way and breakup the teachers unions (through school choice).
School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
You know what would go a long way towards increasing the effectiveness of schools?
...funding them, equitably. Simple as that. Public school funding is derived from local property taxes, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas are just boned.
Invest in schools and good education results. Look at the States in the 60s and 70s! California was #1 in the nation. Prop 13 passes, capping property taxes (and thus school funding), and now it's at the bottom of the heap. It's not hard to draw the line between inputs and outputs here.
Vouchers will only further weaken our already-starved public education system.
> School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well.
How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.
When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?
> You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
Shutting down schools is highly disruptive for students currently attending that school. Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.
I'm not convinced school choice improves results for students overall. The easiest way for a school to improve its results are by attracting parents who are highly invested in their child's education. Those whose parents don't have the knowledge to work the system or the time to transport their children across town for school every day are less likely to apply.
> The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
The problem with this solution is that there is barely enough interest in most places to fill a board when almost everybody is eligible. I've been married to a school board-er. It's a thankless job, far more thankless than being a teacher, which is a job with an actual salary and very good job safety.
> The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
Most typically administration != board. An elected or appointed board will be made up of politicians, who can also class members of parents, teachers, community members, all of the aforementioned, etc.
Expecting a board to be entirely made up of people who have served in the organization's service delivery doesn't make sense. Would you expect a police board to be entirely made up of cops? There is an inherent conflict of interest.
I love the solution you propose. There are certainly other ways in which the whole school system can improve in this and other directions. The most-direct (and sensible!) reform I've come across is: distribute education funding equally, without tying school income to local taxes paid. You end up with richer schools receiving a lot of funding, while the poorer neighborhoods (already disadvantaged as it is) receiving unacceptably low funding - exacerbating the inequities currently engrained in the current system.
Given that I'm reading pretty much the same articles about teaching experience for decades now, how sure we are it isn't dominated by an idiot majority yet? I mean, looking around and reading the news, I can't really name a lot of things that tell me it couldn't be the case...
FYI Vancouver is still keeping advance placement classes which is the typical way for smart students to excel. The program being cut was only at two schools in the super rich part of town and kinda seemed like a “free private school program in public school”
Like electing judges and sheriffs, this seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Most other countries appoint professionals to manage their education systems, and for good reason.
IMO, this sort of thing is just as dangerous as any other type of radicalism. Take anything too far, and you cause immense damage to society.
The formative years age just that. Disrupt that significantly, and the individual is forever lacking. Society needs people in all roles, we'd die of plagues, and disease from vermin, without garbage pickup. Incredibly vital, that job is.
Yet who will create new vaccines, new tech to clean up the planet, get mining and resource production into space, and more? Only those with certain genetic gifts, but the "feel goods" want to believe everyone is identical.
Equality is not this. Equality comes from things like providing access ramps for those who cannot climb stairs, providing tools for those to make the best of what they have.
You don't "pull down" people to make equality, you lift up people. And this means that you see who needs help, and give it.
And you can't do that of you pretend everyone is the same.
As a side note, plumbers, electricians, those working in construction, arborists, on and on, there are many very comfortable, well paying jobs open to those without advanced science, math, language skills.
In my public school, both at grade and high school levels, we had shop class, and in high school, auto, electrical wiring, art, A/V, environmental science (farming), and more. There was something for everyone to excel in, and I took most of these, on top of advanced sciences/math, for fun, for the sheer sake of knowledge.
Don't remove potential, instead, seek how to enable every child's capabilities.
> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism".
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different?
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
> I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.
+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.
There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed".
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame.
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles
I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.
Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it.
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.
Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified.
This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
> Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
I think the 50% rule is okay. I get that it's annoying for the students who tried and got a 55%. But I suspect that the kids who would get score much less than a 50 are probably the least engaged and most disruptive.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
The 50% rule is just changing the meaning of the numbers, no? 50% is the new 0%.
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
The system giving these rules is set up so the two are indistinguishable. Some people can't even tell the difference. Others can, but they keep quiet so their career isn't destroyed.
Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.
I've never understood school either. Now that I'm 40 years old, I understand it less. I think there was a generation of adults who were 'in on the rhetoric' at one point. Telling people that these are places of education, instead of a kind of reformation facility, akin to jail.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
>Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes.
>I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.
It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.
I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.
I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout.
Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.
I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
You’re describing Finland. They outlawed private school funding for exactly the reason you’re proposing: to get the wealthiest and most engaged parents invested in fixing public schools for all.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
This is a big oversimplification. There are many differences in education between Finland and the US. Pointing to a single one and declaiming it as the cause is unjustified.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
Private schools are subsidized by the government. Charter schools receive virtually all of their funding from the government. The state could only fund public schools
people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
"people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage"
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
I think you are into something indeed.
When rich / powerful people have to send their kids to the same schools, it became important to have the best one.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
In France there is a mandatory "map" where you can only send your kids to the nearest public schools.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
> lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed.
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
Majority of education budget goes to paying for pensions of retirees.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
I doubt that these problems are from a lack of funding.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
FYI private schools are not immune to these problems. The administration of some private schools choose to have similar policies (accept late work indefinitely, minimum grade of 50%, etc) at their school.
Of course, but it is very much up to the parents which product they want to buy (another problem of private schools to be sure). There are several that focus on rigorous academics, language immersion and even world travel.
Alternatively we should ban public schools and force parents to send them to a private school, which if the money that would otherwise have gone to the public school gets sent along with them isn't very expensive (here in Denmark something like 80-90% of the money follows the student).
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
I think a better solution is funding students instead of systems. Give everyone the ability to opt out of broken systems, force all schools to compete for students.
The more likely result of your "solution" is that everyone simple gets a worse education.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
The people most capable of changing schools are the boardmembers and well funded unions. Private schools are simply the best alternative right now.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
I don't know where you are in the US, but this won't fix the problem instantly. Even across public schools, there are competitive ones, and there are non-competitive ones. There are high schools where 25% of the class goes to top colleges, and there are high schools where most don't go to college at all. The presence of the 'good' high school drives up property values too.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
That describes a lot of the US. Rich people are creating their own country with nice schools and neighborhoods while they never have to interact with the country the rest of people are living in. That's why I am against things like congestion based pricing for toll roads or school funding based on property tax. They give rich people the impression that everyhting is wonderful and no change is needed.
And my belief is that we should have educational vouchers that cover the cost of public schools. So parents can choose to send children to public school and apply voucher there, or to spend it as private school. Public schools with low sign-up rate are closed. Trust me, all schools will be reasonably good in the few years.
And where do you send kids after schools are forced to close? Private schools will raise their rates past what vouchers cover, and the poor will be continually left behind while the rich talk about how great choice is.
Public school is broken and we all know it - in general.
We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.
Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.
Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
I think you’ll find those parents who don’t don’t have the time to engage with their kids are working far more than 40 hours. The lucky ones are probably working 60-70 for a tech company and making bank, the unlucky ones are working multiple minimum wage jobs to just live with the basics.
For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.
"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.
They punish this skill. I was literally expelled from my high school during senior year for arguing with a teacher over her misinterpretation of something stated pretty plainly in the textbook. The teacher got furious when I stated confidently that she was wrong, and within about 15 minutes I had been taken to the principal’s office and told to never tell a teacher that they are wrong, to which I said “even if they are wrong?” and she expelled me on the spot. The expulsion was overturned about a week later but it was a terrible week for me and my parents, and I got pretty behind in my schoolwork because of it. And to be clear the problem was that the teacher was saying something different from the textbook, so this was not a subjective matter, or a question of knowledge exactly. If she had just said “ignore the textbook” it would have been fine.
I think you are working in the right direction, but you have to include lies that are believed by the teller, semi-lies that were honestly conceived but lose their earnestness through determined avoidance of self-questioning, and even honest but harmful mistakes.
Public schools where I live in Texas are great. Much better than the $33k per year school we had in Silicon Valley. The places were they seem broken are in big city districts where certain political factions, specifically teacher unions, get outsized influence on policy. I saw this up close when I lived in Jersey City and was considering a run for school board on Mayor Fulup’s slate of candidates. After being warned about “crossing the unions” and getting into tiffs with the NAACP representative, I discovered that many of these groups don’t care a lick about education, only money and power. And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands. Those suburban districts spend less than the districts that perpetually fail. There are policy problems, not financial ones.
> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD.
Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century.
My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth.
Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain.
> The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).
> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t.
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldn’t be worth while.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
the more you extend debt financing for a given thing the more expensive something gets... mortgages or student debt. debt is where new money comes from in our financial system...
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
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Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.
Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves.
I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems.
I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis.
:Continued below:
Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.
It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.
Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.
I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.
The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.
But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?
The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.
You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school.
To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.
Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
We should definitely take care of them as a society built on solidarity, but we can be efficient about it too.
This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong.
There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now.
Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
Results?
The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all.
If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards.
The solution is this: Ban anyone without a minimum teaching experience of x years from participating on boards, bring all teacher salaries up to comfortable middle-class in every district and give them back their authority in the classroom. Otherwise this downward slide into illiteracy will continue until North America is dominated by an idiot majority.
> Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.
https://www.heritage.org/education/report/critical-issues-as...
> Our recent report, “Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers,” [1] concluded that, on average, public-school teachers receive total compensation that is roughly 50 percent higher than what they would receive in private-sector employment. While salaries are at appropriate levels, fringe benefits push teacher compensation far ahead of what private-sector workers enjoy. Consequently, recruiting more effective teachers for public schools will be much more difficult than simply raising salaries.
> The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession.
Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years old engaged in your teaching and making them progress seems pretty hard to directly transfer to any other non teaching job.
I feel it’s like asking a pro sax player to transfer skills in another domain and ponder they lose a lot of market value.
Which is also part of the other quote you bring in. If I were to move to a teaching position, I’d look damn hard to be better paid or I wouldn’t move. And it’s not like an Amazon factory worker could just move into teaching tomorrow when he can’t take it anymore. So the pool going into teaching is extremely self selected and also biased.
Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well.
If teaching is low-status it is no wonder that education standards are low and thus educational achievement is low, as they note in the article. The alternative is failing most students and having a labour supply problem. In my country, Australia, you occasionally see news articles describing some shockingly bad final year high school scores (ATAR scores) being accepted into teaching degrees. Unfortunately, the fact that this happens further entrenches teaching as low status and puts downward pressure on the minimum bar for ATAR scores.
Remarkable, but unsurprising, that the Heritage foundation then suggests _lowering_ wages even further. You’ll get even worse candidates heading for teaching and they may even be able to next time show the same 9% positive bump.
I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead.
Zooming in a bit…the big “fringe benefit” is obviously summer vacation. Valuing that correctly is tricky, and the assumption used in that report is that it’s linear in the amount of time off: one week off is worth $X, so the summer vacation must be worth $15X. I would bet that’s not really true and it has declining marginal value like everything else.
We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.
The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.
The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.
The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.
You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.
Its exactly what I'd expect if tecahers were underpaid but most switches from other jobs into teaching were from jobs taken as a student pre-qualification for entry-level teaching jobs and most switches out were post-retirement-from teaching “have something productive to do” jobs.
Meanwhile my anecdotal rebuttal is I graduated with 6 folks who went into teaching. All 6 left to do other things and within 5 years were making more than they would have at the end of a 30 year teaching career.
"We just need better teachers" says a group composed of people who are entirely sure the profession is beneath them.
I agree. I have a friend that took a lower paying job because he could not stand the handcuffs that the administration placed on teachers. Stuff like you have to give people a 50% if they put their name on the paper, you can't discipline students effectively, etc. I also know many teachers at private schools that make less than the public school counterparts but would not switch due to similar reasons.
[0] As per https://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-teachers-pay-in-..., the US starts out below the bar for tertiary-educated workers and gets even lower
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"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
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Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.
Ultimately, teachers alone can't solve the problem. As seen in both poor white rural schools and poor non-white urban schools alike, if the parents don't care about schooling or enforcing any discipline at home, there will be significant problems at school.
And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).
Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.a... [2] https://www.teacherpensions.org/states [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/07/11/tea...
Naturally, statement like that usually then gets attacked as 'but not enough'. Based on results alone, CPS teachers are actually paid too much.
Teachers are well paid in Canada, and in many Canadian mid sized cities a teacher with 10 years experience will make more than a software developer with similar years experience. Additionally they have a strong pension, and incredible job stability.
e.g. A teacher in Saskatoon would make about $92K with 10 years experience with a defined benefit pension, and 2 months off in the summer.
It is tougher for teachers in high COL cities like Toronto and Vancouver as they make roughly the same as they do in the rest of the country. (But similarly a Vancouver software developer doesn't get a USA west coast salary)
Source: My wife teaches, and I write software!
I feel that the main issue is that the wrong things are being taught. How about things like personal finance, basic mechanical and electrical skills (like for DIY repairs), and logic or philosophy of argument classes? It would also be good to teach the basics of civics since a substantial portion of the population can't pass the citizenship test.
But something being required and something being preserved is very different. It's very normal to lose a lot of that knowledge after a couple years so if your goal is they pass a civics test/know basic finance it'll probably continue to fail even with all states requiring it.
I think the meme about teachers being underpaid is mostly unuseful in conversations like these.
Second the pay also usually includes retirement benefits that can pay you 100% off your salary after 30 years. This is hard to compare to private industry since 401ks have replaced pensions. This is probably worth 2-5m when mature, and is accounted for in their pay. I think this is the biggest issue, since private employers pay higher expecting you to invest in your retirement.
Benefits are also usually good with small if any employee contribution. Probably worth a few hundred dollars a month.
It’s almost impossible to lose your job teaching. It has a factor of security that does not exist in private industry.
Pay raises are automatic. Primarily it’s based on years of service and level of education.
I’ve run the numbers previously and it starts seeming fairer, but due to the retirement impact it makes buying a home in the Bay Area almost impossible.
In my state, older teachers get these, but newer teachers including some of my friends have been cut out of them and need to invest in a 401k like other job. Their wages are also much lower, around 35k/year to start with, peanuts when you consider that they take work home every night and weekend (correcting homework and lesson planning are mostly done on their own time).
Why do you think you need to be a teacher to direct how our schools are run?
Seems technocratic and anti-democratic.
The same way we have civilian control of the military, we should have civilian control of our schools.
Did you know in the UK there is actually a structure called governors to ensure that schools are being directed by the community, not by education insiders?
It would be enough to have have the top brass of education elected. You can even make the curriculum part of election campaigns.
That’s roughly what my 32 year old accountant wife gets, and they get nearly 3 months vacation a year and much better benefits and retirement stuff than she does. Considering I know more people that have gone in to the teaching profession than anything else, that seems more than fair.
Also, a lot of those older teachers that I looked up would have been fired from any other job if their performance was the same. I’d only be ok with a massive increase in teacher pay if teacher’s unions were abolished. The only firings that have happened to tenured teachers here in the past 20 years have been for sexual misconduct.
Federal representative
Provincial representative
Municipal representative
Mayor
School board trustee.
The PM? Head of the party with the most seats. Same with provincial premiere. Judges, crown attorneys, controllers, senators, the governor general, etc? Those are all appointed by our elected representatives.
A central ethos of Canadian governance is that our representatives are there to make decisions and bouncing questions to the public is a tool of last resort.
With that on mind, why the hell do we have elected school boards? We have a provincial ministry that runs education. We have municipalities that manage land-use.
Voters are basically flying blind in trustee elections. There are no debates, no media coverage, no political parties, just a list of names. If they don't happen by your doorstep, you don't get to know who these people are... And even if they do, you've only got their word to go on.
Ax this anachronistic institution and let the education policy professionals within the state/provincial government and school boards do their jobs.
Any perspective how these things work in countries that have a well-regarded, high performing education system, like Finland (apart from having well-trained, highly regarded, and highly trained teachers with a large degree of autonomy)?
The school system is a failing monopoly that should be broken up.
Money Follows the Person (MFP) Rebalancing Demonstration is part of a comprehensive, coordinated strategy to assist U.S. states, in collaboration with stakeholders, to make widespread changes to their long-term care support systems. This initiative will assist states in their efforts to reduce their reliance on institutional care, while developing community-based long-term care opportunities, enabling the elderly and people with disabilities to fully participate in their communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_Follows_the_Person
The solution is to get rid of the monopolistic education system which is prone to imbalances and subpar results.
Charter schools/private school/school choice. Recruit the best teacher, pay the best salaries, achieve the best educational outcomes.
No wonder the educational system looks like it does given the incentives at play.
School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
...funding them, equitably. Simple as that. Public school funding is derived from local property taxes, so rich areas have good schools and poor areas are just boned.
Invest in schools and good education results. Look at the States in the 60s and 70s! California was #1 in the nation. Prop 13 passes, capping property taxes (and thus school funding), and now it's at the bottom of the heap. It's not hard to draw the line between inputs and outputs here.
Vouchers will only further weaken our already-starved public education system.
How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.
When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?
> You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.
Shutting down schools is highly disruptive for students currently attending that school. Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.
I'm not convinced school choice improves results for students overall. The easiest way for a school to improve its results are by attracting parents who are highly invested in their child's education. Those whose parents don't have the knowledge to work the system or the time to transport their children across town for school every day are less likely to apply.
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The problem with this solution is that there is barely enough interest in most places to fill a board when almost everybody is eligible. I've been married to a school board-er. It's a thankless job, far more thankless than being a teacher, which is a job with an actual salary and very good job safety.
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Most typically administration != board. An elected or appointed board will be made up of politicians, who can also class members of parents, teachers, community members, all of the aforementioned, etc.
Expecting a board to be entirely made up of people who have served in the organization's service delivery doesn't make sense. Would you expect a police board to be entirely made up of cops? There is an inherent conflict of interest.
Like electing judges and sheriffs, this seems to be a peculiarly American thing. Most other countries appoint professionals to manage their education systems, and for good reason.
The formative years age just that. Disrupt that significantly, and the individual is forever lacking. Society needs people in all roles, we'd die of plagues, and disease from vermin, without garbage pickup. Incredibly vital, that job is.
Yet who will create new vaccines, new tech to clean up the planet, get mining and resource production into space, and more? Only those with certain genetic gifts, but the "feel goods" want to believe everyone is identical.
Equality is not this. Equality comes from things like providing access ramps for those who cannot climb stairs, providing tools for those to make the best of what they have.
You don't "pull down" people to make equality, you lift up people. And this means that you see who needs help, and give it.
And you can't do that of you pretend everyone is the same.
As a side note, plumbers, electricians, those working in construction, arborists, on and on, there are many very comfortable, well paying jobs open to those without advanced science, math, language skills.
In my public school, both at grade and high school levels, we had shop class, and in high school, auto, electrical wiring, art, A/V, environmental science (farming), and more. There was something for everyone to excel in, and I took most of these, on top of advanced sciences/math, for fun, for the sheer sake of knowledge.
Don't remove potential, instead, seek how to enable every child's capabilities.
Lift up, don't pull down.
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Let me fix that for you - get rid of government schools, let anyone teach.
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I find this situation baffling.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester".
To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing?
And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it.
If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed.
However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate kicker was that the following year after the Algebra II disaster, the state changed the grade scale so the grade I received would have been a B. But the old grades were not retroactively recalculated.
There is a good argument to be made that minimum grades are a joke and an affront to teaching, but I would argue that grades in general are bullshit and frequently are not indicative of whether a person has mastered anything. There is a reason many of the best private (not to mention Montessori schools) don’t emphasize grades or tests. Equally, there is a reason that the Montessori and related methods doesn’t scale in the way that US public school systems need to scale.
Dead Comment
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
I really doubt high school helps with this.
Wow, I had never read that before:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%.
Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
>I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect.
Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/KBDLA/
It has the umlaut (actually diaeresis in a Spanish context I think) and acute accent mark pretty prominently available.
Look at the Spanish Spain keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/kbdsp
It has them even more prominently available, right on the same key that an English American keyboard would have the single and double quote.
I wonder whether the students' families are from Spain or Mexico, and whether they're using the Spain vs the Mexico keyboard. I wonder how many people from Mexico use the Spain keyboard due to software confusion.
Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.
I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.
I eventually gave up and just accepted the typos.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
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What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
https://lycee-henri4.com/admission-2/
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
But let’s me add some counter example for the sake of it.
here is public high school, with « famous »teacher and kids clearly coming from the wealthy élites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri-IV
The trick is that the selection process is so stringent that you basically have to be :
- a genious in getting excellent grade according to the French system or … - have parents that coach you to get in there.
Here is another similar public high school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Louis-le-Grand
Again, I mostly agree with you point. But dépending of the country, a private education can be seen of « bad taste »
We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school.
Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.
All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.
Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.
That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
Dead Comment
If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.
Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century.
My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth.
Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain.
Better doesn't automatically mean good.
Do you need any more than basic literacy and numeracy to be a retail worker, cook, laborer, driver?
These students would be much better off learning a hands-on trade, or in the workforce.
The school leaving and employment age should be moved to 14. Expulsions should also be properly enforced, including for non-White children.
NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled.
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf
> The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students