[HN Gopher] The Tragedy of America's Rural Schools
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The Tragedy of America's Rural Schools
Author : mooreds
Score : 29 points
Date : 2021-09-07 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| duxup wrote:
| During COVID I knew some rural and suburban teachers. Once they
| went online only at the rural schools the rural teachers reported
| never hearing back from as many as half their students.
|
| Normally not going to school would mean you are held back a year
| or fail or something. They just chose to pretend it didn't happen
| and the kids lost more than year and will just show up again this
| fall.
|
| Very disheartening to think of what kind of education they're
| getting.
|
| These are places where people feel forgotten, almost entirely off
| the map, like they're in another country, and right or wrong they
| feel that way and that leads to actions that fit it too.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I live in a city and this happened there too... maybe half of
| the kids in my son's class showed up a few times early on and
| disappeared entirely for the rest of the year. We had a few
| stops and starts ourselves.
|
| I don't want to be too presumptuous but this largely seems tied
| to family income. The families that could afford to have one
| parent working less often to help kids with school did so,
| everyone else disappeared. In one instance the only at-home
| help an 8 year old had to get Zoom set up was his 12 year old
| sister.
|
| We have programs for free laptops and free internet, but they
| rely on parents being savvy/available enough to see it
| through... so it's not unusual for those free services to go
| unused despite being needed.
| handrous wrote:
| Everywhere had similar "just dropped off" stats. I'm sure some
| places were worse than others, but alarming rates of students
| who basically didn't attend school were the norm.
|
| [EDIT] FWIW, in-person schools saw worse results last year,
| too. Online may have had really bad attendance problems, but
| in-person still had significant issues (all the usual parents-
| keeping-kids-out-for-dubious-reasons, plus COVID-related
| quarantines, crappy alternating-day schedules, et c.) such that
| despite the problems with online school, the district into
| which I had the best insight had _worse_ overall outcomes for
| in-person. The district tried to spin that, for political
| reasons, but that 's how the numbers worked out, for that
| particular district.
| mudil wrote:
| Public schools in the United States are a total disaster. Never
| mind that billions of dollars are spend on education, on research
| of education (edu depts in universities, federal Dept of
| Education, nonprofits, etc), and on public policy designed to
| improve the education (sociology depts, etc). These millions of
| people are supposedly serving the children, the minorities, the
| disadvantaged.
|
| Where are the results?
|
| Why do poor kids end up in atrocious schools that don't teach?
| Why do minority kids, say in Baltimore, end up in the filthiest
| schools that have drugs and no education? Where are the results
| from all these do-gooders that constantly say they are
| representing minorities and children?
|
| We need a diversity of school choices and, more importantly,
| diversity of opinions on how to handle this crisis. Liberal left
| controls the educational system from the very top to all the way
| on the bottom. Now for many years. And education is not working
| for inner city schools and in the rural areas.
| handrous wrote:
| Effective solutions amount to "solve poverty, and/or socio-
| economic divides in housing distribution".
|
| By that I don't mean that we shouldn't try, but we should,
| ideally, work toward _actually solving_ the problem, which
| means schools aren 't the front-line for this change. There's a
| reason we spend so much on schools--hell, some of the worst
| here pay the best and get tons of extra (federal, state) money
| --for such poor outcomes, and it's because that's the wrong
| place to be focusing that effort. It's like trying to lift a
| boulder by hand, unaided, versus with heavy machinery &
| rigging. You can put in _so much effort_ and yet the boulder
| doesn 't move.
| Cookingboy wrote:
| >solve poverty, and/or socio-economic divides in housing
| distribution
|
| Most countries don't have education quality this much tied to
| local property taxes. It is totally possible to increase
| equality for education without fully fix income/housing
| inequality.
| handrous wrote:
| The property tax thing is mostly a red herring. Again, some
| of the _best-funded_ schools in my city are the worst ones,
| because they get lots of money from other programs that
| aren 't funded by local property taxes. They're still very
| bad. Insufficient spending may be a _part of_ the problem
| in _some areas_ but even if you entirely fixed that, you 'd
| have done very little to fix American schooling.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| This might be the case in your school, but where I grew
| up in the ghetto, the schools were absolutely falling
| apart. We didn't have the money to maintain vegetation so
| most of the school used sand. Our sports courts were
| forever falling apart (though luckily even bent
| basketball hoops work well enough to satisfy bored
| teens). Our library couldn't afford to stay open. Some of
| our classes were administered in trailers because the
| school didn't have enough classroom space. The power
| would go out from time to time because the school didn't
| have enough money to upgrade their power distribution
| infrastructure. And of course the quality of instruction
| was abysmal.
|
| I agree that local property taxes aren't the whole
| picture but they determine _quite a bit_. I know kids who
| grew up in more middle (or higher) class neighborhoods
| had higher property tax values and didn't suffer many of
| these problems as a result. As it is growing up in the
| hood was a pretty harrowing experience, but let me tell
| you that I did not look forward through trudging through
| sand into a trailer to take class by an unmotivated
| teacher who just wanted to clock out. Sure American
| education is still horribly patch-worky and quality is
| highly determined by local government policies, but
| there's a base level of dysfunction that can be solved
| through funding schools outside of property taxes.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The NYT article is about schools with broken sewage pipes
| leaking into the floor, missing textbooks, missing
| teachers.
|
| You can talk all you like about the other factors that
| affect the quality of educational outcomes in a given
| school (district), but if basic infrastructure like those
| I've cited from TFA is not functioning, the other factors
| don't really make a lot of difference.
| mudil wrote:
| Just FYI, US public education is not good even in affluent
| areas.
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| > Just FYI, US public education is not good even in
| effluent areas.
|
| See: Freudian slip
| Cookingboy wrote:
| Compared to what? I grew up in Shanghai and went to great
| schools but I also attended one of the best public school
| districts in Texas for high school, and there are many
| areas that I think my high school did better than its
| Chinese counterparts.
| Cookingboy wrote:
| If you want relatively equal access to education and ensure
| minimal gap between poorer areas and wealthier areas, then
| there is no alternative other than a centralized education
| system where tax is collected federally and funding and
| initiatives are driven by comprehensively studying the needs of
| the whole country.
|
| Just like many other things in this country, the distributed,
| State/local based education system simply does not scale for
| the 21st century.
|
| The reason we are wasting so much money in education is despite
| the total cost, due to the siloed/localized system we have, we
| can't effectively direct funding to places that need it most.
| The federal government can spend tens of millions doing some
| "study" in why education sucks in rural schools, but it can't
| use a penny of that money to actually pay salaries of teachers
| in rural schools. In some other countries you have national
| programs where they pay young teachers extra to go to less
| desirable areas to teach, and that's just one minor examples we
| can learn from.
|
| And that's not counting the whole federal budget. Just imagine
| how many school districts like the one from this article we can
| save if we just build _one less_ Ford class aircraft carrier.
| [deleted]
| mudil wrote:
| Statements like "local based education system simply does not
| scale for the 21st century" is a bunch of nonsense.
|
| Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve
| accountability from Baltimore politicians? Who runs these
| schools? Republicans in Texas?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's a false dichotomy here.
|
| Local control does not have to imply local funding.
|
| The funding system can migrate to the state level (I find
| it hard to imagine that the states would agree to an
| explicit federal level funding system). The control (i.e.
| how the money gets spent) can remain (substantially) local.
|
| What is objectionable about the current US version of
| "local based education" is that the funding for it depends
| to a very large extent on local property taxes. Have the
| misfortune to be a school student in a poor area, and you
| will probably get a worse education than someone with the
| good fortune to be a student in a wealthy area.
| Cookingboy wrote:
| >Don't you think that children of Baltimore deserve
| accountability from Baltimore politicians?
|
| Nope. Education is such a complex and critical task that
| letting local politicians to decide the fate of our
| children in the hyper competitive 21st century is
| borderline insane.
|
| >Who runs these schools? Republicans in Texas?
|
| That's complete strawman. Most countries have _non-
| partisan_ experts (i,e non-politicians) in charge of
| education. Just because everything is politicized and
| hyper-partisan in this broken country doesn 't mean it's
| the only way going forward.
| merpnderp wrote:
| True, a voucher system that let parents take their education
| dollars with them and spend it on the school of their choice
| would go a long way towards solving this. There's a reason the
| only serious opponents against school choice are teachers
| unions.
|
| In some inner city districts there's a budget of nearly $20k
| per student. At that rate, a few parents could get together and
| hire PhD's to personally tutor their children.
|
| This is something a well off friend of mine did with a bunch of
| other people during COVID last year. He called it a pod of
| families.
|
| Imagine if everyone had access to this through vouchers?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I think you need to read the article.
|
| Based on the article, nothing about your proposal would fix
| the school system in Holmes County, MS. Not in a million
| years.
| dashundchen wrote:
| > In some inner city districts there's a budget of nearly
| $20k per student. At that rate, a few parents could get
| together and hire PhD's to personally tutor their children.
|
| It's important to consider a good chunk of the budget
| inflation in city districts isn't for education, because in
| the US, urban school systems also serve as the social service
| system for so many students.
|
| Medical check-ups, meals before and after school, social
| workers, devices like hearing aids, physical/occupational
| therapy - all of this gets routed through the school system
| because it's the best chance of delivering these services to
| the students, especially those from lower income families who
| are frequently transient.
|
| From the districts near me, the largest urban district is
| also where most students with the most severe disabilities
| (and most expensive needs) are sent from the whole region.
| Suburban and rural districts don't have enough of a
| population to serve their needs, so their education is
| centralized in the city.
| benji-york wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210907102713/https://www.nytim...
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I could go into the whole "how the system is broken" side of
| things, but I want to focus on the other aspect: intolerance.
| Intolerance of anyone who doesn't fit in.
|
| My brother's wife is a Pediatrician. Not a teacher, but the story
| of rural schools is kind of the same as of rural healthcare. She
| is an immigrant, who studied in America, but as part of her visa,
| she needs to serve an "underserved area" for at least a couple of
| years. She's more than happy to do it.
|
| She had a couple of jobs interviews across the country. One of
| them, in rural Alabama, paying $450000. But when she went there,
| even before she reached the hospital, she received so much
| hostility, she decided she didn't want to pursue it anymore. She
| instead took up a job in rural California, and gets paid half of
| what she would in Alabama, where despite being a conservative
| stronghold, it's comparatively better.
|
| It's one of those things which unfortunately money cannot fix.
| ku-man wrote:
| If you provide her country of origin it will help to put this
| account in a better context
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