[HN Gopher] Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games (...
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Charter schools, social norming and zero-sum games (2010)
Author : luu
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-07-07 10:46 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (educationandstatistics.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (educationandstatistics.blogspot.com)
| bsuvc wrote:
| The author seems to be saying that the reason charter schools are
| successful is because of self-selection, and that is also why
| public schools are worse, due to the inverse of self-selection.
|
| While there is certainly self-selection occurring here, it would
| be a mistake for policy makers to dismiss the problems with
| public schools as just being due to that. They should introspect
| instead of seeking excuses.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Also it's totally fine for the rich to self-select among many
| private schools. Apparently it's only a problem when poor
| people similarly have choices.
|
| Why is having competition among public schools, with parents
| having a choice as to which to send them, so bad? It doesn't
| make any sense.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| The professional/managerial class can't stand being
| responsible for their policy failures -- which become
| apparent when people have options.
| cardamomo wrote:
| The author is suggesting that the self-selection effect is a
| problem for this and similar studies, because they
| potentially mask the effect they the learning environment
| has. In fact, the author sounds quite complimentary, calling
| the program being studied "an impressive, even inspiring
| initiative to improve the lives of poor inner-city children
| through charter schools and community programs." This piece
| is calling for randomized trials, as opposed to observational
| studies.
| fmajid wrote:
| A randomized trial would probably violate all manner of
| ethics rules, and be vociferously opposed by parents, at
| least those who care about their kids' education, and thus
| we'd fall back to the same self-selection problem the
| author highlights.
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| Not necessarily. I went to a charter middle school that
| received more qualified applications than they had seats,
| so they had a lottery every year. You could easily
| compare students who won the lottery to those who did
| not.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > Also it's totally fine for the rich to self-select among
| many private schools. Apparently it's only a problem when
| poor people similarly have choices.
|
| That is, I believe, misrepresenting the problem. Rather, it's
| more like
|
| > It's fine for the small subset to self-select among many
| private schools. Apparently it's only a problem when the
| masses similarly have choices.
|
| And that makes sense, because 0.5% of people/funding/etc
| being taken out of schools isn't a big deal... but 20% starts
| to make a big impact.
| busterarm wrote:
| > And that makes sense, because 0.5% of people/funding/etc
| being taken out of schools isn't a big deal... but 20%
| starts to make a big impact.
|
| Public schools in NYC spend yearly twice per child what the
| cost is for the average private school in the city. ($38k
| vs $19k). And on the private school side of the equation
| that average is skewed upwards by a minority of very
| expensive ($60k/yr) schools.
|
| If you're spending more money for worse results, we SHOULD
| divert funding to better-performing alternatives.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > If you're spending more money for worse results, we
| SHOULD divert funding to better-performing alternatives.
|
| The data doesn't really say this. Two things to know
| about education:
|
| - A large percentage of school outcomes are dictated by
| home life. Interviewing parents or just picking from the
| population of people who can afford $20k a year allows
| you to pick from a higher achieving cohort.
|
| - Private schools don't have to provide the same level of
| services to children who require additional care. This is
| a significant cost saving. Most schools I've worked at
| had multiple staff dedicated to the care of just a
| handful of children.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> multiple staff dedicated to the care of just a handful
| of children.
|
| It gets worse. I've seen multiple staff dedicated to a
| single child, and not the sort of child you would think
| needs that much. It is mostly behavioral issues that
| result in some kids needs near-constant dedicated staff.
| busterarm wrote:
| Every private school I ever went happily took and cared
| for disabled children. My impression was that they had a
| pretty great experience compared to my years in public
| school, where all disabled children were in the same
| classroom regardless of grade and basically were babysat
| and not educated all day.
|
| And we had plenty of braindead but normal kids too. Their
| parents paid out large donations to get their useless
| children passed through school and at least an attempt to
| educate them.
| treeman79 wrote:
| My kids go to a charter school. Wife works there. They
| have a number of people with severe disabilities. A few
| require multiple staff members per kid. It's a huge
| burden as they don't get nearly as much money as regular
| school. they only get state money, not local county
| money.
|
| This is a language immersion school. Kids with IQ of 50
| and lower are getting no benefit.
|
| But siblings go there to so the parent doesn't wanna make
| two stops.
|
| My wife's class was mostly shutdown for 6 months because
| she got six special needs kids and her kindergarten class
| at the beginning of the year. A mix of non verbal,
| Violent and or extreme low IQ.
|
| It took that long to go through all the legal processes
| to get them moved to the proper rooms. She had quite a
| few injuries from it all. Lot of parents were unwilling
| to admit that kids had any issues.
|
| Plus a lot of these issues were not caught in preschool
| since the pandemic had those shut down.
| kurthr wrote:
| Exactly, public schools pay about 3x cost ($30k/yr vs
| $10k) price for each of the (learning and other) disabled
| kids which private schools and charters completely avoid.
| It's just cost shifting and the only solution would be to
| share costs, which (like insurance) reduces profits so
| they'll fight tooth&nail.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Money isn't being taken out of schools when students go to
| charters. It's just going to different ones.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| At the end of the day its still a hollowing out of the
| school districts budget to make room for a private
| industry to exist. It really shouldn't be a goal because
| this is fundamentally more inefficient than just fixing
| whatever perceptions are bad about the district.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Reality. Those schools are not going to get fixed.
| Solution, let parents they care send kids to ones that
| are better.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Fixing a monopoly that has little incentive to improve is
| incredibly difficult. Without competition there is no
| reason for the public school districts to improve.
| hoppery wrote:
| One might consider the democratic elections of school
| boards and governments a form of competition, however
| antiquated it may be.
| [deleted]
| nxm wrote:
| Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools
| hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations.
| Recently, these unions succeeded to lowering testing standards
| for graduation in blue states to mask the worse job they're doing
| teaching our kids:
|
| Examples: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/new-york-
| lowers-bar-...
|
| Meanwhile major cities have the highest per pupil spend for
| public schools, with frighteningly poor outcomes.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/bal...
|
| Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations is
| not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes away.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| The need for affirmative action exists regardless of what you
| do to K-12 schools as long as college admissions count
| standardized test schools and extracurricular activities.
| cardamomo wrote:
| The articles you cite don't mention teachers' unions at all,
| and they don't point to "the worse job they're doing teaching"
| as the reason for renorming standardized tests. I agree with
| you on the need for reform (though I have a hunch we would
| disagree on the specifics), but I don't think your argument
| adds up.
| thelock85 wrote:
| > Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools
| hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations.
|
| I''d break this into two statements with "public schools" being
| part of both:
|
| 1. Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools
| _because they are not mandated to serve every student and can
| therefore siphon off failing or behaviorally challenged
| students back to the public system._ Find me a charter system
| serving special needs and at-risk students better than the
| public system at the scale of a public system, and I 'll change
| my mind.
|
| 2. Public schools _have been_ hijacked by the teachers union
| and bloated administrations _because their funding structures
| are controlled by politics and culture wars instead of targeted
| research and practice on what specific kids need._ I 'm not a
| fan of teachers unions or bureaucracy, but who else takes the
| heat for teachers who are under-resourced, under-paid, and
| over-worked?
|
| > Fix K-12 schools (no, more money on bloated administrations
| is not the answer), and the need for affirmative action goes
| away.
|
| 100% agree on the affirmative action part, but to fix K-12
| schools you need new or other institutions to pick up slack on
| supporting students. The reason that "Deputy Assistant Senior
| Manager of Cognitive and Emotional Development" exist is
| because the law is pretty clear about how a school district is
| responsible for a student with XYZ cognitive and emotional
| developmental challenges. To get rid of that administrator, you
| also need to transfer (operationally and legislatively)
| ownership of that responsibility.
| willio58 wrote:
| > Charter schools are the saving grace to the public schools
| hijacked by the teachers union and bloated administrations.
|
| Where I live, charter schools are a joke. They're old office
| buildings converted into "schools". This is super unsafe and
| honestly quite sad to see in most cases because these office
| buildings are on busy streets with no playgrounds (what they do
| have is basically a concrete slab in the back with nearly no
| play equipment).
|
| News flash: if you want education to "work", we need to pay
| teachers more. Subsidizing private companies (charter schools)
| through vouchers is just a leach on resources we could give to
| our existing schools and teachers instead. There are millions
| of teachers out there, some with master's degrees, who make
| much less than a new grad junior dev who goes to work, edits
| some CSS, and browses Reddit the rest of the day. We simply
| don't value education in the US enough, and charter schools are
| a non-solution proposed by those who would rather run away from
| the problems than face them head-on.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I fail to see how even doubling teachers salary would resolve
| anything. I'd love to see a study where a school simply
| increased teacher salaries alone and that improved outcomes
| for students.
|
| The issue is almost entirely cultural and socioeconomic.
| Fixing schools is basically fixing society. Intractable,
| which is why every school from Harvard to Oxford relies on
| glorified selection bias instead.
| ink_13 wrote:
| A lot of really good educators leave the field because the
| money is garbage. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
|
| Given the central role of education in our society,
| teachers should absolutely be paid more.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Quality of the education isn't the main issue with
| schools though. Or to put it another way, do you think
| Baltimore Public schools issues would be resolved with
| simply better teachers and a more rigorous curriculum?
| [deleted]
| Loughla wrote:
| It's almost like there isn't one cause and YET we try to
| find the one silver bullet over and over and over again.
|
| Some schools the issue is teacher quality. Some is
| curriculum and resources. Some is external factors like
| food insecurity, housing, or crime.
|
| It's weird like that.
|
| After decades in education, I can tell you that the same
| five ideas get rehashed every six to eight years. And we
| ignore that our education system is nothing but a
| reflection of society in the US.
|
| If you have money and connections, everything is groovy.
| If you don't, it's not.
| ink_13 wrote:
| A more rigorous curriculum? Maybe no. But better
| teachers? Absolutely yes. There is more to teaching than
| lecturing in front of a blackboard.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Given the central role of education in our society
|
| The "central role of education in our society" seems a
| lot like a slogan that is, at best, aspirational, and at
| worst false-meritocracy cover for persistent structural
| inequality.
|
| While educational performance and attainment seems to
| correlate a _lot_ with success, differences in
| educational interventions and methods seem to do a lot
| less: those measures that seem to matter seem to
| themselves largely be a function of who you are and what
| your home environment is. Its not clear that education,
| particularly K-12, is doing a lot more than measuring
| structural advantage.
| scoofy wrote:
| I think it's more complex than this. The unions have
| effectively traded higher-pay for greater job security,
| so we have the worst of both worlds.
|
| I generally find myself pro-organized labor, but when we
| start reducing in-group competitiveness for high pay,
| into low pay alternatives like seniority systems, job
| security becoming job permanence, or outright hostility
| to technology, that's when I start seeing the model break
| down.
| willio58 wrote:
| Take Nevada as an example.
|
| Entry Level Teacher salary in Nevada is $43,316 as of June
| 26, 2023, but the range typically falls between $36,172 and
| $52,827.
|
| Imagine living on 36k per year before taxes. Imagine making
| that much, being not only in charge of controlling a
| minimum of 30 kids per year, but also being expected and
| required to educate those children all while spending (on
| average) 700$ per year of _your own money_ on classroom
| supplies. Yes, that's real. That's the new average amount
| teachers spend out of pocket on classroom supplies because
| education funding is so abysmal in the US.
|
| Contrast that with an average starting salary of 86k as you
| suggest. That would be a materially huge jump and change in
| the financial support we give to teachers, along with an
| acknowledgment of how important their jobs are. As a web
| developer in my mid-20s, I make far more than any single
| person working in my high school. Of course, I took the
| tech route and that's highly valued in society, but I'm
| only here because of those teachers taking an interest in
| me in high school. To me, that just doesn't make any sense.
| ak217 wrote:
| I broadly agree, but teachers and other public employees
| have pension plans that are funded mostly by the employer
| (public) and pay 50-80% of their annual salary for their
| lifetime after 30 years of service. So you can't compare
| those numbers directly.
| halfnormalform wrote:
| The promise of future pensions can't be used to pay
| bills, though. The teacher still has to survive in the
| world using the dollars that show up on their paycheck
| today.
| kelipso wrote:
| Good luck living on that pension after a decade or two of
| inflation.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'm not saying teachers shouldn't be paid more. I'm
| saying paying them more isn't going to fix the problems.
|
| The reason you make more is because your company
| presumably has revenue. Schools don't so the entire value
| proposition is different.
| willio58 wrote:
| > I'm saying paying them more isn't going to fix the
| problems.
|
| I fundamentally disagree. How can we expect teachers
| living paycheck to paycheck to educate kids well? They
| have no emergency fund. They're one medical emergency
| away from bankruptcy. They don't have retirement savings,
| and they have no idea when they'll be able to start
| saving for retirement. Being poor isn't just financial,
| that stress creeps into every aspect of your life
| including your job.
|
| Also, I want to note one thing. It's not the dollar
| amount specifically I'm talking about. Sure, it would be
| a quick fix in my mind to pay teachers more. But really
| it comes down to how those dollars are being spent. In
| our country, too much money is being spent on student
| loans, housing, healthcare, food, and transportation. If
| the prices for all of those could come down, that would
| work too. It's about getting teachers out living paycheck
| to paycheck.
|
| > The reason you make more is because your company
| presumably has revenue.
|
| Public schools are a service our government provides for
| us because there's an understanding that education is
| important. So important that we actually require children
| to be educated, which is obviously a good thing. If you
| ask what's the revenue source, it's called taxes. If we
| don't have enough money to pay teachers livable wages, we
| either need to take money from somewhere else _cough_ the
| military-industrial complex _cough_ or increase taxes on
| the rich. And when I say rich, I mean the filthy rich.
| The people who pay almost no taxes currently and instead
| put the tax burden on the poor and disappearing middle-
| class families. The highest marginal tax rate reached
| nearly 94% in the 1940 's. Right now, our highest
| marginal tax rate is just 37%. Essentially if you make
| 570 million per year in the US you pay no more money
| relatively speaking than someone making 570 thousand per
| year. If we taxed the rich more, we could easily pay for
| better education in the US.
| wudangmonk wrote:
| I think the solution people are proposing is paying
| teachers more AND removing all the fat from the
| administration side in order to help fund some of it.
| This will not be enough since the education system has
| been through decades of being gutted in favor of stealing
| the public's money in favor of private interests. I am
| including the whole welfare system the U.S has in its
| "defense" budget that seems to be invisible to both
| parties who will otherwise fight tooth an nail for every
| other bone and scrap that comes in sight.
|
| The U.S should be aiming for something like Finland for
| its education system. Their secret sauce is not what they
| teach at all. Teachers are well paid and its a very
| desirable job therefore its very competitive.
|
| Contrast that to the U.S where its just above the poverty
| line and therefore most people do not want to do it.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > Imagine living on 36k per year before taxes.
|
| Is that supposed to be hard? I've spent less than that
| almost every year I've been working, and I live somewhere
| a lot more expensive than Nevada.
| jancsika wrote:
| 36k _before taxes_
|
| - 2.2k (FICA)
|
| - 4k (Health Insurance)
|
| - 4.3k (Income Tax)
|
| - 1k (3% matching Simple IRA)
|
| but ignoring 3.8k into HSA and 6k going to Roth IRA
| because we are probably too poor to do that
|
| =
|
| whopping 24.5k
|
| If you spend less than that I'd love to know what is in
| the care packages your mom sends you each week.
| willio58 wrote:
| The poverty line is about 15k for a single person in the
| US. For a family of 3, that line is about 25k. The
| poverty line is also widely criticized for being too low,
| so yes. It's hard. If you're not a single person willing
| to live in a shared apartment, it's exceptionally hard to
| see any future with that amount of income.
|
| I have a dev friend who makes over 200k working for Apple
| and lives in our friend's garage paying just 200 a month
| for rent. His case has nothing to do with the average
| living expenses of average teachers in the US. He's an
| outlier, as I suspect you are.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > The poverty line is about 15k for a single person in
| the US. For a family of 3, that line is about 25k.
|
| Then 36k should be enough to support two dependents
| without any other income, as it's almost 150% of poverty.
| And I suspect most teachers are not supporting two
| dependents on their incomes alone, so your comment makes
| me feel stronger about my previous statement.
|
| As for me being an outlier, maybe? I don't live in a
| basement. I live in a regular apartment with one
| roommate. I have a car (2014 sedan) and buy regular
| groceries, go on vacations, do things with friends, live
| a pretty regular life. The main way I'm probably an
| outlier is not buying a new car, and keeping my car for
| probably 10 years.
|
| I take objection to you saying "if you are not ...
| willing to live in a shared apartment" as if that's some
| grand imposition. To me it sounds like you might be the
| outlier? Normal people, even couples live in shared
| apartments all the time.
|
| I want to note that I didn't claim that teachers aren't
| underpaid (I haven't researched or thought about it
| enough to make a decision). Just that 36k isn't some
| impossible amount to live on, which it's not in most
| places.
| AmVess wrote:
| Spending more does exactly nothing.
|
| https://www.schooldigger.com/
|
| It is almost universal that the worst performing schools
| have the highest spend per student, while the best schools
| have the lowest spend.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Pay is only one part of what motivates teachers. I've seen
| more teachers leave because they don't feel empowered than I
| have because of pay.
| MrVitaliy wrote:
| I wonder if lack of empowerment is partially caused by
| unnecessary layers in administration. Admins are there
| "support" teachers but that probably also takes away some
| of the job aspects that feel "empowering."
| aaroninsf wrote:
| "Highest spend per pupil"
|
| PSA a primary driver for this (along side other issues) is that
| in "major cities" the affluent pull out and stick their kids in
| private schools, creating a feedback loop of public school
| increasingly capturing all and predominantly the least- least-
| supported kids.
|
| And teachers then teach in over-crowded classes with 3x the
| student-teacher ratio of the private schools, while also
| providing de facto baseline social services of many kinds.
| While horrifically underpaid.
|
| Meanwhile the right wing is driving this feedback loop on
| multiple fronts, as it has been for decades--with the collapse
| of secular public education an open agenda for those decades.
| scarmig wrote:
| The solution to people fleeing public non-charter schools to
| go to better options is to provide opportunities for kids who
| remain in public schools to thrive.
|
| As it stands, school districts are doing the opposite.
| Getting rid of educational tracking at least, or banning
| algebra in middle school because it's inequitable at worst
| (as in SFUSD). This isn't a matter of funding but ideology.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| >Recently, these unions succeeded to lowering testing standards
| for graduation in blue states to mask the worse job they're
| doing teaching our kids
|
| The link provided shows that, in fact, the union opposed the
| change. This claim is a bald faced lie, and lies should be
| downvoted on HN.
| namelessoracle wrote:
| what union opposed the change? The Alliance group mentioned
| is not a Union of teachers. https://www.aqeny.org/
|
| Unions aren't mentioned at all in the article. Your claim is
| also a bald faced lie. More so than the OP. This article
| supports OP's claim https://nypost.com/2023/03/16/nys-
| education-leaders-again-pr..., I can trivially find other
| articles from other sources where the New York teachers union
| has made it clear they dont find how they are evaluated by
| test scores acceptable. That may even be a reasonable
| position to have. There is more data out their to support OPs
| claim than yours that they are against it.
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Nothing has been presented that suggests that the teachers'
| union wanted this to happen. That "article", an editorial
| from a right-leaning source, doesn't support the claim that
| "the New York teachers union has made it clear they dont
| find how they are evaluated by test scores acceptable". In
| fact, it doesn't include any statements from any unions at
| all, direct or indirect.
|
| If one actually reads it, it's just a recapitulation of the
| root-level link. "SED", the organization the editorial
| rails against, isn't a teacher's union, you know -- it's
| the State Education Department. ctrl+f for "union" in that
| piece, and beyond a reference to the Times Union article,
| the only involvement of a teachers' union is at the end,
| where the editorial's author claims that the union is the
| only beneficiary of these shenanigans, and implies that
| they had a dastardly hand in anointing the Assembly
| Speaker.
|
| >There is more data out their to support OPs claim than
| yours that they are against it
|
| Ah, but you didn't provide _data_ , but instead a slanted
| editorial without the proof you trumpeted. If there were
| other articles from other sources that you could trivially
| find, why didn't you use them? Why use this and
| misrepresent what it said?
|
| And, fine, you got me, there doesn't appear to be any
| direct link between the AQE and a teachers' union -- where
| I come from, the teachers' union donates to grassroots
| lobbyists like that, the better to improve education
| funding for children, because teachers are actually there
| to teach kids, not get fat from subsidy and shirk their
| responsibility. I reflexively assumed it was the same here.
| TBH, I suspect we're not going to see eye to eye on this
| because I can't conceive of a scenario where teachers would
| rather just turn down the standards rather than lift up
| their charges. What's happening sounds like an admin thing
| -- and indeed, both the root-level link and your editorial
| suggests that it's the admin, the SED, doing this. I hate
| to say it so bluntly, but I think your own biases are
| clouding your judgement as to what's happening here and
| why. Blaming teachers is a red herring, as teachers
| generally do not have control over, nor approve of, what
| school boards wind up mandating in the name of "cost-
| cutting" or "modernization".
| P_I_Staker wrote:
| In some cases outcomes might just be bad in major cities. It
| may be counter intuitive, but in many ways cities have felt the
| brunt of economic and racial injustices.
|
| Are major cities more likely to contain people in abject
| poverty, who perceive their situation as hopeless, sometimes
| correctly? Many people struggle with learning, due to
| conditions at home, and without money there's no get out of
| jail free cards. Kids need people with money to advocate for
| them, or they can be abandoned by society, told they will never
| amount to nothing (very much like Biggy Smalls did), and their
| talents overlooked.
|
| For people living in these conditions college may be
| achievable, but there's a very narrow window, with a ton of
| risk involved. To summarize, perhaps we're simply spending
| more, to combat bigger problems (often ineffectively); versus
| the quality of education being as poor as you claim.
| forgotOldLogin wrote:
| The Times Union piece you cite does not say that the union
| supported lowering standardized test scores required for
| graduation. In fact, the article quotes the union funded
| Alliance for Quality Education as opposing the change.
|
| Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate costs,
| reduce funds available for traditional school students in
| sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources. When
| students leave traditional public schools for charter schools,
| the traditional public school is unable to reduce costs in
| proportion with the loss in per-pupil revenues. Students in
| public schools are left with fewer resources.
| wyager wrote:
| Presumably the equilibrium state is that we will have fewer
| public schools and more charter schools, rather than a bunch
| of half-occupied public schools.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Is competition in other industries bad and wasteful too,
| since it creates duplicate systems with duplicate costs too?
| Should we replace it with a single monopoly per industry?
| uoaei wrote:
| We've already taken a wrong turn if we're treating
| education as an "industry" and not a public service.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| I'm sure my district is worse than yours, but here the public
| schools are a waste of taxpayer resources. They are corrupt,
| with more than a handful of superintendents being arrested
| for sweetheart contracts. They have extreme administrative
| bloat. They spend more per student than almost any other
| district in the world. And the outcomes are absolutely
| garbage. 25% of high schoolers are now in charters here, and
| honestly it's not for any reason other than the utter
| incompetence of the public school district. Why should we be
| giving more money to the system that parents have roundly
| rejected? At this point I'm forced to see the public schools
| as a waste of taxpayer resources that reduce funding for the
| more successful charter schools. We need competition to make
| schools better. The district was resting on its laurels since
| they were just counting on poor students showing up no matter
| how shitty the product was. The public can't accept that.
| sixothree wrote:
| What makes you think charter schools are less corrupt other
| than their lack of accountability?
| katbyte wrote:
| The solution is to fix public schools not fund charter
| schools. That's a failing of the Goverment more then
| anything else.
| achates wrote:
| Politicians have been claiming they're going to fix
| public schools for my entire adult life and haven't made
| an inch of progress in that time. We need to abandon the
| delusion that there's one weird trick (that doctors hate)
| to fix public schools and instead move to a different
| system.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The solution is to fix public schools not fund charter
| schools.
|
| Charter schools are a mechanism for opt-in flexibility
| within the public school system to enable identification
| of generalizable improvements; if there isn't systematic
| evaluation and feedback into the broader system, that's
| definitely an issue, but (unlike vouchers, which are low-
| accountability subsidies to nonpublic schools), that's
| what charters are _for_.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and: Privatization greatly impairs transparency and
| accountability. Because private entities fall outside of
| public disclosure laws like FOIA. With depressingly
| predictable results.
| zaphar wrote:
| If we've learned one thing about education over the years
| it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help.
| Improving educational outcomes requires at least 2 things
| that the article mentions:
|
| 1. Engaged parents.
|
| 2. Social Norms that normalize learning behaviours.
|
| Parent's can control the first directly and the second
| indirectly by "choosing" a non public school option or moving
| to a district that has the proper norms.
|
| Charter schools are one of a class of escape hatches that
| less advantaged parents can choose in order to impact the
| second factor for their child. I strongly believe that these
| escape hatches should exist for the Parents who can't easily
| move or choose a private option. Improving education outcomes
| for the children of those parents who do care requires giving
| them tools to support their children whether the environment
| itself does or does not.
|
| It seems unfair to force those parents to fail just because
| their community is failing around them.
| willio58 wrote:
| > If we've learned one thing about education over the years
| it's that past a certain point more funding doesn't help.
|
| Have we learned this? I don't remember a single time in my
| life when teachers were generally considered fairly paid.
| chung8123 wrote:
| It is more a dollar spend on the parents is going to have
| a better outcome than a dollar spent on the teacher. I
| think Andrew Yang referenced this in his book.
| kodah wrote:
| > Charter schools create duplicate systems with duplicate
| costs, reduce funds available for traditional school students
| in sending schools, and are a waste of taxpayer resources.
|
| I went to a private school. Obviously slightly different from
| the Charter system, but only in administration of funds
| (depending on the state). This statement is categorically
| untrue. The private school that I went to was not analogous
| in learning or structure to the public school system.
| Coaching for college admissions essentially took place since
| first grade and gradually ramped up. Additionally, the school
| taught to different learning styles instead of just one.
| Where these schools fail is socially because often kids are
| geographically spread farther apart. As a result I was
| alienated at times both at school and out of school depending
| on where I needed to put my time. When I transferred to
| public school I was bored out of my mind for years due to how
| far ahead I was from 8th grade. It took until around junior
| year before I began learning new-ish material.
|
| To call them a "waste" of tax dollars ignores the fundamental
| problems with the public school system and why the separation
| occurs in the first place. Those fundamental problems are
| thorny issues though; you'll end up creating very different
| teaching methods, levels of classes, etc for a wider group of
| kids that will continue to grow as an area grows more dense.
| This was more sustainable at my private school because class
| sizes were smaller. I also don't think blaming teachers is
| really the right way to go here; most of them are underpaid
| and mistreated.
| davemp wrote:
| Take a survey of public school board budgets if you want to
| see a waste taxpayer resources. There is already all the
| duplication of effort and wasteful initiatives you could ask
| for.
| eimrine wrote:
| Could you ELI5 this article for me? I am amazed by the high
| quality comments here but the article is not readable for me.
| sixothree wrote:
| The quality of comments here is pathetic. These are some of the
| most misleading arguments I've ever seen. Every bit of evidence
| is some exception to the norm.
| [deleted]
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I had 3 sons in my county's first charter school. We enrolled
| when it launched.
|
| It was a mistake I regret. My kids were not baseline* and the
| educators were out of their depth. They took their obligations
| seriously and made good faith efforts but weren't able make the
| leap (during our 7 years).
|
| We left for the county's public schools and they were a world
| better - by every measure. I am not overstating that an inch.
|
| All that said, I still felt the charter was a good fit for normie
| students and I recommended it to some parents (but not all).
|
| * One was high functioning autistic. Two coped poorly with the
| limited curriculum.
| h2odragon wrote:
| (2010)
|
| > we are thinking about spending an enormous amount of time,
| effort and money on a major overhaul of the education system when
| we don't have the data to tell us if what we'll spend will wasted
| or, worse yet, if we are to some extent playing a zero sum game.
|
| ... well, do we have the data now?
|
| Seems to me the "education system" keeps having the same debates
| over and over; surely "data" isn't at issue here? From an
| outsider perspective it seems like all sides to any debate feel
| free to make up any data and any reinterpretation of existing
| data they need, in order to support their position of the day.
| AmpsterMan wrote:
| That's exactly what they say in the beginning:
|
| > First off, this is an observational study, not a randomized
| experiment. I think we may be reaching the limits of what
| analysis of observational data can do in the education debate
| and, given the importance and complexity of the questions, I
| don't understand why we aren't employing randomized trials to
| answer some of these questions once and for all.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| The drive to use public tax dollars for private schools is great
| when it is STEM. Seems good right? Charter Schools for STEM. Who
| could argue?
|
| People miss that the primary interest groups that are lobbying
| for private schools, that are arguing against public schools, are
| for Religion. They want to be able to teach the bible as fact,
| not teach evolution, to allow prayer.
|
| By syphoning public dollars, into private schools, they are
| bypassing the separation of state-church.
|
| This then takes dollars away from public schools, which then
| struggle. Then the awful state of the public schools, is used as
| an argument for more private schools, and thus more religious
| schools.
|
| Eventually the population wont be able to think in scientific
| terms anymore, logical reasoning will be gone.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Ya this is a really sad turn of events for the US. When I was
| growing up in the 80s and 90s, public school was considered one
| of the pillars of the American Way, like free speech and MTV.
|
| But after 9/11, trillions of dollars got funneled to Christian
| nationalist groups loosely aligned against Islam and diversity
| in general, who wouldn't have otherwise received that money,
| that work tirelessly to underline American values like the
| separation of church and state that you mentioned. Now whole
| generations have been raised under an MTV that doesn't play
| music videos. It seems like it's the same, because we have
| reality shows and influencers and people who are famous because
| they are famous. But it's not the same.
|
| Private school is not the same as public school and it never
| will be. I would even go so far as to say that it misses the
| point of education altogether. Like a for-profit church or
| hospital. Privatization is making America a caricature of
| itself.
| brightball wrote:
| My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina.
|
| They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel
| twice a week and allow prayer. It's also the best school in the
| entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school.
|
| There are a lot of anti religious scare tactics used to push
| people off of vouchers.
|
| The reality is that the only people with true choice in school
| selection have to either be able to afford private school,
| afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford
| to have parent who can facilitate a home school group.
|
| Voucher proponents want everybody to have all choices
| available.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Voucher proponents want to get parents hooked on the idea of
| charter schools, and then the schools will invariably raise
| their prices past the cost of voucher when the undesirables
| start trickling onto their campuses.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| There is a world of difference between means-tested
| vouchers and non-means-tested vouchers. Non-means-tested
| vouchers will have the effect of making expensive private
| schools more affordable for the upper-middle-class, while
| means-tested vouchers can't do that.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| cmurf wrote:
| I went to a Catholic one of these. World religion was a
| double edged sword. If you're born a Muslim and are a good
| Muslim you go to heaven. But it's better to "upgrade" by
| converting to Catholicism.
|
| That's what we were taught. Including the inferiority of
| evangelical Christianity. i.e. belief in Christ as a deity
| and your redeemer, isn't good enough to get you into heaven.
| You have to do good works.
|
| I have every confidence religious schools teach the
| superiority of their religion. With a white Jesus on a cross.
| It's not Jewish and Muslim schools pushing for public money
| without strings attached into private schools. It's Christian
| schools.
|
| Well maybe there will come a time once again when folks
| understand Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists, from
| which we get the wall of separation between church and state
| phrase. It is in the letter from the Danbury Baptists we see
| what they were worried about. It wasn't Jews, Muslims,
| atheists, or anti-religionists. They were worried about the
| Danbury Congregationalists.
|
| Christians are not on the same page, is an understatement.
| They really aren't all on the same book either. It's
| impossible to promote them all the same. And they will not
| and should not permit dissimilar promotion.
|
| The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion is
| to also preserve freedom from it. The government must only
| promote secularism. Everything else is playing with fire.
| brightball wrote:
| > The only sane solution to preserving freedom of religion
| is to also preserve freedom from it. The government must
| only promote secularism. Everything else is playing with
| fire.
|
| There's nothing about vouchers that prevents the creation
| of secular private schools. Religious schools that you have
| no choice but to attend are very, very different than
| religious schools that your parents choose for you because
| they think it's the best place for your education.
| cmurf wrote:
| Government providing $1 to a religious private school is
| finding favor in that particular religion. Since
| Christian schools are more common than any other, public
| funding in any amount is the state promoting that
| religion above others.
|
| A possible work around is the state donates $x to each
| registered religious organization in that state. Every
| group gets an equal amount.
|
| John Rawls "veil of ignorance" thought experiment applies
| here.
| brightball wrote:
| Technically, non-Christian public schools are more common
| than any other now.
|
| You need to look at the inverse of this though. If people
| want to be able to ensure that people without the
| financial means to participate cannot attend, all they'll
| need to do is attach a religious label to the school and
| that will ensure that the funds aren't able to be
| accepted. Creating an exclusivity by proxy.
|
| The other issue is the assumption that public funds
| aren't supporting any religion already. This is a loop
| hole by claiming that a religion doesn't have an actual
| deity and therefore is exempt. Meaning, you can teach
| anything you want as long as there wasn't a deity
| involved.
|
| Mindfulness, for example, comes from Buddhism but is
| widely encouraged in public schools. It's only allowed
| because it doesn't claim a deity. The "Church of Satan"
| goes out of it's way to claim they don't believe in any
| god. Hedonism goes back to the days of ancient fertility
| cults that were typically associated with some type of
| idol worship, but as long as you don't publicize the idol
| it passes the "no deity" test.
|
| The "veil of ignorance" definitely covers use cases along
| with this. There are a lot of parents who are very aware
| that belief systems are being taught in schools, deity or
| no.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| >"It's also the best school in the entire state."
|
| That is the problem. Why not make public schools better? Why
| is everyone else at a disadvantage. If our focus was on
| putting funding into 'all' schools, not just 'rich geographic
| locations', then everyone could be educated.
|
| It isn't about 'Choice', it is about everyone getting a
| minimal education.
|
| If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into your
| particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at home.
| But everyone should learn the old Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.
| brightball wrote:
| > That is the problem. Why not make public schools better?
|
| People have tried. The problem is the governance structure
| that creates a race to the bottom. It's not a question of
| funding anymore.
|
| The reason that private school is so successful? It's run
| by teachers. People who have gone to school, received
| training and degrees as professional educators. Not only
| are they able to get together to talk about new techniques,
| figure out the best ways to teach and improve what they do,
| how they teach, what they think is important to teach...but
| they also have to convince parents that the school is the
| best place for their kids to be so there's a natural
| balance factor in play of "teacher collaboration",
| "parental buy in" and "is it actually working for my
| child"?
|
| What sold me was the tour we did when my son was getting
| ready to start K5. Everything looked great on the tour of
| course. I was happy with everything that I saw, but then I
| started asking questions.
|
| This was during the time that common core was being rolled
| out everywhere and I was seeing my friends with parents of
| older kids talking about how students who were previously
| getting straight A's or perfect scores in math were
| suddenly getting bad grades because they were getting the
| right answers the wrong ways. They were turning into
| stressed out, anxious basket cases who hated school. That
| system was being thrust on everybody so quickly by careless
| governance that it was causing chaos.
|
| The dean's answer? "We also use common core here, but we
| decided on that a few years prior after our teachers
| researched it and decided it would be best. It was
| gradually implemented over 4-5 years and parents were
| communicated to about the changes along the way. The entire
| process was very smooth."
|
| That sold me. We actually live where we live because it is
| zoned for a good public school. The option to have a school
| experience for my kids that wasn't going to be disrupted by
| dramatic changes after every election was more important to
| me. I wanted a stable elementary school experience and we
| planned to move them out to public in middle school.
|
| Then Covid hit and the school handled things much better
| than public schools did for those 2 years. Now we're on to
| high school and the political climate is just about the
| strangest it's been in my lifetime with so much politics
| aimed at school boards, so without ever planning to there's
| a good chance that they'll continue here for high school
| too.
|
| The educational factors are important, yes. It's a rigorous
| school. But the stability factor is more important. My kids
| love school. I didn't when I was a kid and I'm very
| thankful that they are in an environment that gives them
| that.
|
| The religious aspects for me are good, but they would get
| most of the same in church. But I do like knowing that the
| same values we teach our kids are being modeled in their
| daily environments.
|
| "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace,
| forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23
| gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is
| no law." - Galations 5:22-23
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Read it sometime. Most American Christians have never
| read the Bible and have no idea what they believe in.
|
| Is this what you want to teach your kids. Search Stoning,
| literally can't get through the day without being stoned.
| This is how we become Ameristan.
|
| ---- Did you work on Sunday? Dead
|
| Exodus 31:15
|
| "Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the
| sabbath of rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any
| work in the sabbath day, he shall surely be put to
| death."
|
| ---- Little Victim Blaming, Dead
|
| Deuteronomy 22:23-24
|
| "If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and
| another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then
| you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city
| and you shall stone them to death; the girl, because she
| did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has
| violated his neighbor's wife. Thus you shall purge the
| evil from among you.
|
| ------ Pretty Harsh - we'll be killing a lot of people to
| comply with this law. Dead.
|
| Leviticus 20:10
|
| "If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor,
| both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put
| to death.
|
| ---- No Bad Words, or you are Dead.
|
| Leviticus 24:13-14
|
| "Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, "Bring the one who
| has cursed outside the camp, and let all who heard him
| lay their hands on his head; then let all the
| congregation stone him."
|
| ----- Wave the bloody Sheet or, Dead.
|
| And father fined.
|
| Deuteronomy 22:20
|
| "But here is the proof of my daughter's virginity." Then
| her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of
| the town, 18and the elders shall take the man and punish
| him. 19They shall fine him a hundred shekels b of silver
| and give them to the young woman's father, because this
| man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall
| continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long
| as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof
| of the young woman's virginity can be found, 21 she shall
| be brought to the door of her father's house and there
| the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has
| done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous
| while still in her father's house. You must purge the
| evil from among you."
|
| ------- Women are property, and the Bible lists a price
| sheet. Rape is just fifty silver shekels. Not dead, but
| now married because you were raped.
|
| Deuteronomy 28
|
| "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to
| be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29he
| shall pay her father fifty shekels c of silver. He must
| marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can
| never divorce her as long as he lives."
|
| ----- Some Sexy Times
|
| Ironically, the least offensive thing here.
|
| Ezekiel 23:19-21
|
| "There she had longed for her lovers. Their private parts
| seemed as big as those of donkeys. And their flow of
| semen appeared to be as much as that of horses. You
| longed for the time when you first became impure in
| Egypt. That was when you allowed your breasts to be
| kissed. And you permitted your young breasts to be
| touched."
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| > Why not make public schools better?
|
| It'd be nice if you could explicitly define how that would
| work. I can understand some ideas not working 100% of the
| time, but throwing money into black holes where nothing
| comes out is an insult to taxpayers.
|
| Baltimore [City] has been the clearest example. I believe
| we're around $25k a head in a seat so far there. At what
| number specifically do you think all that gets turned
| around? $50k? $100k? If you can't answer that, why should
| anyone give a shit about what you think is good for
| society, demanding everyone pay into ponzi schemes like
| Baltimore? If you refuse to answer that, then you are out
| of your depth completely and you have no basis for making
| or influencing policy decisions.
|
| It's far too easy to use other people's money and then
| wring your hands about not getting the results you
| advertised.
|
| edit: [City] need to discriminate between Baltimore county
| and Baltimore city here since there may be eventual
| confusion on school system ratings
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to implement
| it, but you can take one cherry picked example from
| Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style
| theocracy?
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| > So, you need an explicit policy plan and how to
| implement it
|
| Yes? That's how things work everywhere in the world.
|
| I'd like $50 billion and the biggest yacht in the world,
| I don't plan on doing anything to get either of those
| things, so magically, they will appear to me as soon as I
| walk out the door in 20 minutes.
|
| > but you can take one cherry picked example from
| Baltimore to justify turning the US into a Taliban style
| theocracy?
|
| I don't think I addressed religion once until just now,
| so this is coming out of left field to say the least. But
| since you want to be hyperbolic about things I never
| said, I'll imagine your ideas are no more than theft and
| money laundering.
|
| I suppose that's the end of this discussion.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Joke? This whole thread is about religion. People are
| arguing that they need Private Schools so they can have
| the 'choice' to indoctrinate their kids into their
| specific religion. And because public schools 'bad',
| religious schools 'good', They feel justified in taking
| public funds, to support those religious schools. This
| breaks the separation of church and state.
|
| Think this is the old "I Require more proof from you,
| than I provide" argument.
|
| No, posting an entire policy and implementation plan to
| reform the education system, is not commonly done in
| internet arguments with trolls. Neither have you provided
| any detailed analysis of your point. I venture to say,
| the rest of the world does NOT make their policy decision
| based on something posted in an online argument.
| davemp wrote:
| > Why not make public schools better?
|
| Because you can't feasibly make public schools better.
| There are too many entrenched players and layers of
| bureaucracy.
|
| > If you want to 'choose' to indoctrinate your kids into
| your particular religion of 'choice', that can be done at
| home. But everyone should learn the old
| Reading/Writing/Arithmetic.
|
| Afaik charter schools are already obligated to teach the
| minimal set required for standardized testing.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina.
|
| > They are taught about world religions, evolution, have
| chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It's also the best
| school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a
| great school.
|
| I also went to a private christian high school and it was all
| that you say here. However I also remember many very rich,
| ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over
| religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher
| became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go
| somewhere else.
|
| I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it
| was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church
| has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and
| it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a
| public school, these private schools can close and lean on
| the public system to catch all of the students they shake
| out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops
| at Public schools.
|
| > The reality is that the only people with true choice in
| school selection have to either be able to afford private
| school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school
| or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school
| group.
|
| Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these
| problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter
| schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy
| DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense
| contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about
| _Options_ for students /parents, but nobody is talking about
| who is _Obligated_ to those students, parents, _and the tax
| payer_. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its
| students into the pubic system [0].
|
| > Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which
| received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The
| school had barely started its second year when it suddenly
| closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school.
| Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received
| a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its
| first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new
| school.
|
| > The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida
| received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198
| for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken
| over by the district due to financial concerns and
| mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no
| notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of
| them seniors preparing college applications, searching to
| find new schools.
|
| Then there is the low attendence and fraud.
|
| > The report locates much of the blame for this waste of
| taxpayer money on the Department of Education's practice of
| awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no
| accountability. Often, grants were "doled out to individuals
| who had no credentials or experience to open up a new
| school," according to the researchers.
|
| > The report also identified a "pattern" of charter school
| operators--even before their school opened--funneling money
| from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of
| expensive equipment, and to "for-profit consulting and
| education management organizations" that do not publicly
| divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due
| to these practices, the charter school grant program "has
| become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter
| entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in."
|
| The kicker:
|
| > When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those
| findings when questioning Secretary of Education _Betsy
| DeVos_ , she dismissed the findings as "political."
|
| History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of
| the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions
| for private profit.
|
| It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a
| response to desegregation [1] [2].
|
| Privatization is cancer.
|
| [0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-
| report-w...
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy
|
| [2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-
| privat...
| tristor wrote:
| Nice set of anecdotes. You might even be right. It is,
| however, obvious that you are using motivated reasoning,
| especially with that dig at the end essentially calling
| private schools and voucher proponents racist. What's
| galling enough I bothered to respond is that you're
| incorrect on that point. Private schooling predates public
| schooling in America by a lot. Free public education wasn't
| a widespread thing in the US until the 1830s, and wasn't
| mandatory and federally supported until the 1910s. Private
| schools /may/ have opened specifically to counter
| desegregation, but private schools long predate public
| schooling. Private school was the norm for most of the
| history of the US and the commonwealth.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| From [2] above:
|
| > Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in
| America that goes back to colonial times, but that
| tradition ended--at least in the American South--in the
| last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe
| havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the
| impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus
| from public schools began in the 1940s, when private
| school enrollment in the 15 states of the South[1] rose
| by more than 125,000 students--roughly 43 percent--in
| response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing
| segregation in graduate and professional schools in the
| South.[2] While the decisions only concerned institutions
| of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern
| leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their
| public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them
| to react in ways to defend their way of life.
|
| > By 1958, the South's private school enrollment had
| exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over
| an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million
| students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern
| state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and
| resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block,
| postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public
| schools, many of which expressly authorized the
| systematic transfer of public assets and monies to
| private schools.
|
| > During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
| vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private
| schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from
| civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended
| applications of avowed "segregation academies" for
| federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers
| in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income
| when contributing to racially exclusionary private
| schools.
|
| > As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-
| discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a
| series of proposed administrative procedures and
| Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the
| South continued to grow. What was once the South's 11
| percent share of the nation's private school enrollment
| had reached 24 percent in 1980.
| hibikir wrote:
| Even among private schools, pricing differentiation happens.
| My local catholic parish has many schools: Some are very
| affordable, but those are not the good ones. The ones that
| are competitive with the secular private schools charge just
| as much, and it's not due to facilities suddenly costing five
| times as much: It's that, for the most part, only the kids
| with rich parents will afford them, plus a few rare
| scholarship targets that happen to make the school look a
| little diverse. The high price is a feature.
|
| So Vouchers do not have all choices available: Having a
| voucher doesn't guarantee acceptance to a school. And
| depending on your voucher legislation preference, you aren't
| going both force all schools to accept vouchers and make sure
| they don't raise prices. Ultimately, being selective is a
| feature, and therefore prices will go up, not unlike how easy
| student loans for colleges help raise prices. The top schools
| will eat the entire value of the voucher in cost increases,
| or just refuse the value of the voucher if they can't.
|
| You are right in the fact that really, most people in America
| have to pay for the good school district, either straight up
| in cash, or in significant increases in home costs. I've seen
| 30% drops in home values as, within the same district, the
| line of who got to go into the 'good' public school changed.
| Vouchers probably make the school choices far more explicit,
| and might lead to less housing segregation. But they sure
| aren't going to make all choices available to everyone, any
| more than I can choose to marry a supermodel, or own a
| private island.
| LanceH wrote:
| As long as they cover the curriculum required by state law,
| withholding money from them because they choose to teach
| religion is the violation of separation of church and state.
| The money is for the state mandated education of the children
| which is typically being satisfied.
| JediWing wrote:
| It's also in large part profit motive. You can bet there are
| corporations licking their chips at the thought of opening cut-
| rate schools and raking in the profits. They can also
| incorporate all sorts of corporate propaganda that their parent
| companies want them to inject.
|
| The profit motive belongs far far away from education.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| There's nothing that prohibits public funds given to
| individuals from then going to religious organizations, eg
| student loans at university level.
|
| They're not "siphoning public dollars" as some third-party
| cabal; members of the public are choosing to allocate their
| dollars (in benefits) to what they believe will be best for
| their children.
|
| Edit:
|
| It's not "siphoning" because the allocation is made by the
| beneficiary of those funds, who is choosing their preferred
| service provider. There's no diversion of funds: they're being
| utilized by the intended beneficiary in the manner they deem to
| best suit their needs.
|
| That's in contrast to traditional school systems, where funds
| _are_ diverted by administrators to engage in politicking
| unrelated to education.
|
| Edit 2:
|
| I understand that many people are upset the beneficiary of a
| public benefit is allowed to make their own choice of service
| provider. People that in their wisdom, they know better how
| other people should run their lives!
|
| But it's indisputably the case school allocations are to
| benefit the student -- the intended beneficiary. Admit you're
| in a huff because you're being told you can't control what
| other people do with their benefits.
|
| You're like people yelling candy shouldn't be allowed with
| SNAP/EBT funds. Next you'll be yelling about "muh welfare
| queens!" or whatever.
| jgeada wrote:
| It isn't the parent's money!
|
| Everyone in my area pays local taxes, whether they are
| parents or not, including businesses; the bulk of these local
| taxes are allocated to fund schools. Most of us don't want
| our taxes going to charter schools or religious schools, and
| I'm tired of entitled parents siphoning from the system and
| leaving everyone worse off. If you want to make changes, fix
| the rules under which schools operate and allow disruptive
| kids to be expelled.
| cmurf wrote:
| In the U.S. education isn't a right. It's a product you
| buy. Similar to clean water, healthcare, justice, and lower
| taxes. These are all products. You pay more for better
| versions. Public versions shouldn't exist, or should be
| inferior. Why be wealthy if you can't have better things?
| Especially since wealthy people are simply better.
|
| This is old school Conservatism since before the founding
| of the country. There is no convincing conservatives that
| they have any obligation to the public. Money is a means to
| separate themselves from the public. There's a lot more in
| common here with feudalism than anything modern or
| enlightened.
|
| I'm willing to bet more often than not, any expulsion
| should be applied to the parents. i.e. they are the
| problem, and the kid is acting out. Punishing the kid has
| long been a proxy for punishing parents. A more
| sophisticated system identifies this and gives more (with
| strings attached) privileges and responsibilities to
| problem kids. Not in every case. But certainly don't have
| policies that increase contact between problem kids and bad
| parents. Where are they learning most of their coping
| mechanisms? Get them away from bad influences as much as
| possible.
| vacuity wrote:
| I don't think the public school system is bad (mainly)
| because of bias in conservatives to favor private
| schools. As for your last paragraph, it seems like a
| logistical nightmare. How will the kids be cared for and
| educated away from their parents? I agree with the
| premise (to put it crudely, fix situations where kids
| have terrible parents) but I'm not sure this is workable.
| cmurf wrote:
| It's metaphorical. You don't literally expel the parents.
| Provide more and more diverse extracurricular activities.
| Even when schools aren't providing those activities they
| can make students and parents aware of them. Perhaps
| school boards could be convinced some kids need
| compulsory activities. If they can have the power to
| expel, they can have the power to do mitigation.
| jgeada wrote:
| Expelling difficult kids has the nice property of
| aligning those parent's interests with everyone else's.
| If you have a difficult kid, right now if you don't
| handle the problem it becomes everyone else's problem but
| you're not affected. If the difficult kid gets expelled,
| now it is _solely_ your problem. It only takes a few
| cases for parents of difficult kids to become _extremely_
| interested in the behavior of their kids and educating
| them on what proper behavior should be. As it should be.
| vacuity wrote:
| I'm not sure that actually puts pressure on the parents
| to be better. I think that decent parents generally raise
| decent kids because they're good role models, and the
| opposite for bad parents. There are exceptions, but I
| wouldn't rely on it. If a bad parent suddenly has to be
| fully responsible, I doubt they'll suddenly have a change
| of heart and be able to change the kid's behavior
| (depending on how old the kid is).
| vacuity wrote:
| If the parents are just a bit misguided, that could help
| greatly. I'm concerned that terrible parents would still
| have much influence over the development of their kids,
| perhaps even pulling them out of those extracurriculars.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Is it a similar problem if someone on SNAP buys halal or
| kosher products with their food stamps? It's not their
| money either!
| [deleted]
| davemp wrote:
| > It isn't the parent's money!
|
| It's as much theirs at it is any other citizen's.
|
| > entitled parents siphoning from the system
|
| Very loaded choice of words.
|
| Parents who feel entitled to what? A quality education for
| their children?
|
| > If you want to make changes, fix the rules under which
| schools operate and allow disruptive kids to be expelled.
|
| Foisting the responsibility on individual parents to push
| huge political changes through seems entirely unreasonable.
| jgeada wrote:
| But it is much more everyone else's than theirs.
| Everyone, individuals and businesses, pays into the pot,
| whether they have kids in the school or not. Individual
| parent's taxes are a minority fraction of the actual cost
| of running the education system.
|
| Thus "siphoning": common public moneys being used to pay
| individual interests. If you want a private education for
| your kids, go right ahead and pay for it, don't ask the
| rest of us to subsidize you.
|
| And yes, we all want a quality education for all
| children. Make schools better for everyone, not just the
| entitled or well connected.
| mhb wrote:
| Competition is a way to make things higher quality.
| School choice is competition.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| If money is literally being diverted, why can't it be called
| 'syphoning'?
|
| Guess it depends on the state.
|
| In my state, public dollars are literally, pulled from public
| schools, and given to private schools, which can then teach
| religion as fact.
|
| How is that not 'syphoning'?
| mhb wrote:
| The "public" dollars were already, literally, pulled from
| the people who would prefer to use them to choose a school
| at which to spend them.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Why can't I choose to have my tax dollars go somewhere
| besides the Military? I think this whole 'choice' thing
| with education is odd. Government isn't a buffet you get
| to 'choose' where the money goes.
|
| The responsibility is to provide a minimum education
| standard. Teach logic, science, math, reading. Give all
| kids equally some minimal ability to function.
|
| Why do some kids get choice and others do not?
|
| If a lot of parents choose to indoctrinate their kids to
| be Scientologist, that would be wrong wouldn't it? That
| would have negative consequences for everyone.
|
| What about teaching them that honor killings if they have
| sex before marriage is ok?
|
| Even the bible teaches if a women cheats, she should be
| stoned. Is that where we are going with our 'choice'?
| What if a large portion of the population 'chooses' to
| stone women because that is what their school taught
| where their parents 'choose' to enroll them. At some
| point that changes society, and that is the goal of the
| religious right in promoting private schools.
|
| If the Taliban choose to teach stoning, it's Evil, if
| Christians do it, it's 'Choice'?
|
| How did we get to a point where people are ok with
| tossing out the separation of church and state?
|
| People are willing to die for the second amendment, but
| really like cherry picking everything else.
| vacuity wrote:
| Not disagreeing with you, just trying to get a grasp of
| your principle here: prohibit schools from
| teaching/encouraging illegal acts?
|
| Morality is beyond laws, in a sense, and you might think
| "immoral acts" is more proper. I don't feel like going
| down that rabbit hole, but I felt I had to mention it.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Teaching about religions, is different than teaching that
| a specific religion is a fact to follow.
|
| The problem is when teaching that immoral acts are
| 'correct', that they are actually 'moral'. As in 'I was
| just taught that stoning was a valid response to
| cheating, hence I can feel moral in stoning someone'.
|
| I think you are wrong that Morality is beyond law. If
| morality can shift based on how you were raised, and then
| people do want laws to reflect their morality, a society
| can get to a point where stoning is ok with the law, is
| legal and moral.
| vacuity wrote:
| I suppose I didn't express myself very well. The rabbit
| hole I mentioned is about how people agree or disagree
| with aspects of each others' moralities, and what the
| outcome should be in the larger context of society. I
| agree that stoning as a punishment for adultery shouldn't
| be tolerated, but that doesn't mean my principles for
| believing that are necessarily the same as yours, or that
| I share your other principles. That's what I'm trying to
| get at.
|
| The dance of which morality is correct and should be
| enshrined in law (I think anything that is "clearly"
| immoral should be prohibited by law as a 1:1 mapping; the
| law is therefore a reflection of morality) is not one I
| like to partake in. Even if we all agree to discard
| current major religious beliefs around morality, there
| will still be many points for people to disagree on. Some
| people will be very left out and others slightly; that's
| what I meant by "morality is beyond laws". There is an
| inherent impasse that arises at this junction.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Ok. I get that. Agree with that.
|
| There is definitely a problem with splitting hairs on
| finer and finer points, until everyone is subdivided,
| until each individual has their own religion, their own
| morality. No two people are identical, and it is also
| impossible to force or convince everyone to be identical,
| thus there is always something different to disagree on.
|
| So all arguments on religion are really fruitless.
|
| I guess I come back to, how to get to a best common good.
| And in todays US, there is such a wide split between
| people, that there is also a wide range of things where
| there could be compromise to have a better society. Every
| difference is a chance to find a solution.
|
| So how do we get to commonalities if kids are
| indoctrinated (brain washed) from an early age. Religion
| blocks progress, because if someone truly believes in
| their god, then they wont compromise. Then there are
| religious wars, persecutions, inquisitions, etc... And
| sadly, the US is moving that way with the blurring of the
| split between state and church.
|
| We don't have to agree on all points of religion to make
| progress, we just have to agree to some basics like maybe
| treat everyone equally, don't beat up trans kids.
| Religion should be taught in the home, not in the
| schools. There should be a lot of room to come together
| before we get to an impasse.
|
| The 'left' is trying to do good, make things better, 'to
| progress', and they are clueless that the 'right' is
| actually in a Holy War without compromises where anything
| goes. It's an un-even fight. This country went to the
| moon, I never in a million years thought we could
| backslide into religious dogmatism. So, all of this
| arguing in this thread that religious schools are ok, is
| really not looking at history.
| vacuity wrote:
| Well said, and I agree. I have some staunchly religious
| friends, and while they're happy to discuss things with
| me, there are just some topics they'll never change my
| mind on, nor I them. Oh well. That's life. I'll stand up
| for what I think is right and hopefully society largely
| agrees.
| stale2002 wrote:
| > Government isn't a buffet you get to 'choose' where the
| money goes.
|
| Well, in the case of school vouchers it would be is the
| point, and thats ok.
|
| With regards to paying your local fire department, it
| would be impractical to try and get people to "choose"
| which fire department to be covered by. Fire department
| vouchers wouldn't work.
|
| But with schooling, it very much is possible for parents
| to move their children between schools, therefore a
| voucher/charter systems works quite well.
|
| > The responsibility is to provide a minimum education
| standard. Teach logic, science, math, reading. Give all
| kids equally some minimal ability to function.
|
| Yes, it is good to provide those things. But that is the
| bare minimum. There is lots of room for additional
| schooling choice that go above and beyond teaching the
| most minimal necessities.
|
| EX: If some parents want their kids to focus much more on
| intensive science or technology schooling, thats fine.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| > _Social norming can work both ways. If you remove all of the
| students whose parents are willing and able to go through the
| application process, the norms of acceptable behavior for those
| left behind will move in an ugly direction and the kids who
| started out with the greatest disadvantages would be left to bear
| the burden_
|
| I went to public school as a kid and the disruptive kids were
| expelled. Not just kicked out of class - totally kicked out of
| school and told to find a new one! One reason I send my kids to
| private school is if you don't want to learn they will kick you
| out. In public schools today you get a few bad kids and it ruins
| the whole class. This is a big reason why teachers are quitting
| en masse from public schools - they are behavioral consultants
| rather than teachers. The pay has always sucked - it's the lack
| of ability to discipline bad kids that makes it miserable, and
| then parents blame you for everything when you just want to teach
| math and go home.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I don't get the expulsion discussion here (not just your
| comment, but responses as well). At least in the US, these kids
| legally need to be educated somewhere. Expelling doesn't remove
| them from the school system. It just means they'll be
| disrupting a different set of kids at some other school. Making
| something someone else's problem isn't solving the problem.
| It's like dealing with homelessness by rounding them up and
| bussing them to a different city.
|
| You could conceivably create schools composed entirely of the
| kids who got expelled from somewhere else, which I think some
| districts have actually done (continuation schools), but you're
| effectively creating a juvenile prison system for people who
| didn't commit any actual crime and definitely never got a
| trial.
| sixothree wrote:
| I think that's pretty much the crux of every argument here -
| move those other kids somewhere else. Don't worry about
| improving their situation, but make my situation better.
|
| Cite a study, draw incorrect conclusions from it that support
| your argument, find some exception to the norm and use that
| as your example, and don't forget - describe how you were
| brought up and how that was better.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| An analogy.
|
| In a dorm the week before finals, 90% of the students are
| urgently trying to prepare for finals.
|
| 10% are drunk and or high and playing frisbee in the halls 24
| hours a day.
|
| From friends who have taught high school in poor neighborhoods
| the situation as similar, only more violent.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I went to a public school and disruptive kids were NEVER
| expelled, or kicked out of class, they were just tolerated and
| placated. I wish I had gone to your school because no matter
| how disruptive they were, or how much they bullied others in
| class, the school simply would not expel them. The worst they
| would get is after school detention. It was hugely disruptive
| and made life miserable for the rest of us.
|
| If only disruptive kids were expelled instead of placated MANY
| of us might have had a better education.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| My daughter was threatened by 3 girls (with a long history of
| behavioral problems) that they would beat her up the next
| day. The school VP suggested with a straight face that maybe
| my daughter should stay home that day (since it was a
| Friday).
| [deleted]
| civilized wrote:
| Too many liberals feel such guilt about expelling disruptive
| kids, when the reality is just what you've said: if they
| stay, they don't improve and they ruin genuine learning for
| everyone else.
|
| It is _so wrong_ for adults to fail to protect children who
| want to learn simply because they want a facade of feel-good
| egalitarianism.
| [deleted]
| specialist wrote:
| Was the disruptive student. Am now very leftist.
|
| Some aspects do give me pause.
|
| Such as Any regiment which makes things worse. We're all
| just guessing; people need to be empowered, so hopefully
| they can muddle thru things.
|
| Thresholds need to be obvious and ruthlessly enforced. Not
| fuzzy and optional. (eg If a student assaults a teacher,
| insta removal, to never come back. And so forth.)
|
| Alas, forging these kinds of rulesets, and then sticking to
| them at scale, is all but impossible.
|
| Also, most people blathering about public education are
| repeatedly proven worse than wrong. (Including me.) So am
| deepyly skeptical of fixes and silver bullets. I insist
| there's at least some existence proof before supporting any
| reforms.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| A Republican Congress with a Republican President in 2004
| enacted the federal law that makes it difficult for public
| schools to expel disruptive children.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEA_2004
|
| All a parent has to do is ask for an individualized
| education plan, IEP, and a public school will have to do a
| metric ton of cover your ass to be able to expel a child.
|
| https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED495879.pdf
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The reason for this is that the overwhelming majority of
| bullies and disruptive kids go on to become republicans.
| Unironically.
| civilized wrote:
| While much of what Bush did as President was not at all
| compassionate, he actually did believe in and try to
| practice compassionate conservatism. He made major
| concessions to liberal ways of thinking, some good and
| some not so good. A major good one was fighting AIDS in
| Africa. His education policies were on the not so good
| side.
| latency-guy2 wrote:
| > He made major concessions to liberal ways of thinking,
| some good and some not so good. A major good one was
| fighting AIDS in Africa.
|
| This is not making concessions to "liberal ways of
| thinking".
| civilized wrote:
| I think it is. Part of liberalism is seeing all people as
| worthy of compassion and help, even if they're not
| closely related to you. While the contrasting tendency in
| conservatism is to help people closer to / more similar
| to us and protect ourselves from outsiders who we do not
| understand, may not benefit from our help, or may even
| exploit us. Both of these tendencies are valid and
| adaptive in different situations, they're just different
| and at least somewhat in opposition. Do you disagree?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would think a truly liberal policy would be to provide
| funding for the "compassionate" policies.
|
| On the other hand, federally legislating that local
| school taxing districts provide services costing $x and
| if they do not, open up local taxpayers to litigation of
| $y where x and y are quite large is...something else.
|
| How is a poor school district serving poorer taxpayers
| supposed to provide expensive IEP for every problem child
| and/or collect all the evidence to expel them, and at the
| same time provide quality education to well behaved kids?
| civilized wrote:
| Well, I'd be the last person to expect that any
| particular policy enacted by the US Congress does either
| liberalism _or_ conservatism _effectively._
| rascul wrote:
| > A Republican Congress with a Republican President in
| 2004 enacted the federal law that makes it difficult for
| public schools to expel disruptive children.
|
| The Republicans only had a slight majority. And after a
| change, the bill passed in both chambers almost
| unanimously.
|
| https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/108/hr1350
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The purpose of pointing out that it was a Republican
| majority is to counter the claim that (only) "liberals"
| support not expelling kids.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| The problem is that it just moves the issue around. If you
| expel a 5th grader, they will be at SOME school for at
| least several more years, since that is the law. All you're
| doing is making life more miserable for their parents as
| they have to arrange transportation to increasingly far
| flung school districts, and for the child as they are
| ripped away from all their friends every year when they are
| sent to a new school.
|
| I don't know what the answer is, but "all children are owed
| a public education and in fact we'll arrest their parents
| if they drop out" and "public schools can kick children
| out" are self-evidently not compatible policies.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| Making life more miserable for the parents is, in some
| senses, an encouragement for the parents to straighten up
| and spend a little more effort on their kids. If it were
| completely painless, fewer would bother.
|
| Changing behavior requires _pressure_ and people
| generally do not like it when they notice it.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| There used to be regional boys schools and girls schools
| that had a military-style ethos and were quite effective
| in reforming bad students. They would still interface
| with the local school system in sports and dances, etc.
| So in some cases expelled students didn't necessarily
| have to travel too far, just to the shared alternative
| school for the area.
| civilized wrote:
| > All you're doing is making life more miserable for
| their parents as they have to arrange transportation to
| increasingly far flung school districts, and for the
| child as they are ripped away from all their friends
| every year when they are sent to a new school.
|
| That's not _all_ we 're doing. We're also protecting an
| entire classroom of children from disruptive behavior.
|
| If it's gotten to the point where we would consider
| expulsion, then some of those children, or their
| families, likely find that disruption so intolerable that
| they themselves would need to arrange transportation to
| far flung school districts. That's why so many
| underprivileged families are desperate to get their kids
| into charter schools.
|
| As I keep trying to point out in this comment tree,
| people seem to have learned that it's morally appropriate
| to talk about only one type of victim here. I don't
| agree. I think it's morally necessary to _always_ discuss
| both the disruptive child and the classroom they are
| disrupting, _always_ in the same breath.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| If we suppose that this theoretical child is a problem
| that is disrupting their classroom, then we are not
| saving any children from that disruption, merely
| spreading it around. They will be a problem for one
| classroom this year, a different one next year, and so
| on. Assuming class sizes are the same, we will have on
| average the same number of disrupted-pupil-hours with the
| expulsions as without them, just a different
| distribution.
|
| If you want to argue it's a better distribution, or that
| there is some reason to believe expulsions will push
| "problem children" to smaller classrooms on average, then
| fine, but absent those arguments it's very clearly worse
| for the student and their parents but not better for
| anyone else (or rather, it's maybe better for specific
| other people, but also worse for yet other ones, and on
| average no better for anyone).
| civilized wrote:
| I agree that spreading it around is not clearly better.
| In many districts there are special-ed schools where
| these students are placed. I don't know what it's like in
| these schools. Some of them are probably terrible. But I
| think I'm obligated to weigh that against the disruption
| to a much larger body of students.
| afavour wrote:
| I think it's correct to feel guilty about expelling
| disruptive kids. Majority of cases they're disruptive as a
| direct result of their home life, which you're now throwing
| them into full time.
|
| I agree that keeping them in general education is bad too,
| though. A caring society would take that kid somewhere with
| specialised staff that will help them work through their
| issues.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| You should feel more guilty of subjecting twenty kids to
| the spillover of that one child's dysfunctional life.
|
| The problem is the selective and performative guilt:
|
| Why don't kids who have a terrible home life, but are
| studying diligently to better themselves and improve
| their lives equally deserve our help?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| This is life though, that spillover doesn't disappear
| when you're an adult. You will always be subject to
| someone else's dysfunctional life unless you isolate
| yourself from society completely.
|
| We need to have structures that can address this behavior
| in a way that fosters societal integration. This
| "spillover" might not be a problem given proper
| staffing... but a 1:25 ratio is never enough to handle
| problems and never will be.
| afavour wrote:
| I literally said "I agree that keeping them in general
| education is bad too" but I feel like you have a point
| you want to make irrespective of anything I'm saying so
| go on.
| civilized wrote:
| And I agree with you. It's right to recognize that there
| are no good options here. In such situations, it's
| important to consider the bad effects and victims on both
| sides, not fixate on one as the only morally correct one
| to consider.
| civilized wrote:
| Exactly - this is the tragic mistake of fixating on only
| one type of "victim".
| busterarm wrote:
| Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional
| lives early so that they grow up with the capability of
| empathy towards others. Too many people are in their own
| bubble about how the world works.
|
| For this same reason I've always hated (since a kid) the
| way anti-drug education has been presented to children.
| It's not taken seriously and doesn't present the reality
| of how prevalent drug (even prescription) use is among
| adults in society. It doesn't treat prescription drug
| use, alcohol, nicotine or caffeine abuse with any weight
| whatsoever and doesn't prepare children for the reality
| of having to deal with people who are on drugs.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| All you're teaching is that adults lack empathy towards
| them:
|
| Adults are intentionally victimizing the majority of
| students to cater to their own shallow virtue signaling.
| busterarm wrote:
| Everyone votes too. The government lacks empathy towards
| me by forcing me to have an equal vote with morons and
| criminals.
|
| There are scenarios in life where we're all in this
| together and excising people for their inconvenience
| isn't what's best for society.
|
| You don't just cast off disabled people into the void,
| for example. Unless you have a solution for where to put
| these problem public school kids that isn't juvenile
| detention, I don't want to hear it.
| vacuity wrote:
| I hear you. It's no good for chronically disruptive kids
| to be in juvie all the time, but it's also no good for
| them to remain in classrooms. Any amount of pay won't
| salve the sheer stress of attempting to teach those who
| won't learn. It would be great if someone could just snap
| their fingers and give those kids stable homes or
| something. Unfortunately, I suspect the solution requires
| efforts on multiple fronts (ample food, housing, social
| support, etc.) and will be expensive, difficult, and
| slow.
| busterarm wrote:
| The callousness of the HN commentariat towards those who
| "don't behave according to the rules" is off the charts
| these days.
|
| We're talking about children here. They don't know how to
| behave like adults yet. Cutting them out of society where
| they fail to meet expectations is cruelty.
| civilized wrote:
| It seems to me that you recognize one kind of cruelty but
| not another, forcing innocent bystanders to have their
| education heavily disrupted.
| busterarm wrote:
| No, it's just that "disruptive" is a pretty broad and
| subjective spectrum of behavior and a lot of kids get a
| raw deal from school administrators for really harmless
| shit. See zero-tolerance policies. Everyone in this
| thread is using broad weasel language with a blanket
| response of "expulsion" when really that should be
| reserved for heinous offenses.
| vacuity wrote:
| By "weasel language", you make it seem as if we're
| intentionally lumping in kids who aren't really
| problematic and being sneaky about it. We could all stand
| to be more nuanced, and there may be some people here who
| are just that harsh, but I think you're reading too much
| into our intentions. I doubt most of us support zero-
| tolerance policies (if informed about it). Frankly, I
| think administrators have to be willfully perverse to
| actually enforce such policies.
| hackinthebochs wrote:
| This is sympathy ethics run amok. Being unable to protect
| yourself or your family from disruptive influences
| because of some sympathetic property of the disrupter is
| self-undermining. Presumably you would quarantine a kid
| who contracted some highly contagious and potentially
| deadly disease. This is really no different. One can be
| sympathetic to the plight of an innocent and not be
| willing to suffer significant hardship for their benefit.
| There is no contradiction here.
| civilized wrote:
| Where does this end?
|
| Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional
| behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?
|
| Is this something you would see as desirable to
| experience, for the same reasons you've given that
| children should experience it?
| busterarm wrote:
| > Are people with a pattern of disruptive, dysfunctional
| behavior allowed to be present in your workplace?
|
| Yes, actually. The standard to fire people is high and HR
| wants these people constructively managed out rather than
| fired. This is incredibly common in large corporations.
|
| Had a bad hire once that abused an entire engineering
| department for 2 years while they had no responsibilities
| and did no work until they were finally bored enough to
| quit.
| civilized wrote:
| What about the second question? Is it desirable to
| tolerate abusive employees? Should managers who do
| something about it be considered problematic because
| they're shielding people from the real-life learning
| experience of being bullied?
|
| These are not gotcha questions. I'm honestly trying to
| understand your worldview here.
| busterarm wrote:
| It's not desirable, no, but there are other employers to
| go work for.
|
| If you get expelled _by a public school system_ you may
| not have another option.
|
| My worldview is that all kids have the right to an
| education, regardless of how "manageable" adults
| interpret their behavior. "Disruptive children" are more
| often a failure of the adult to meet the needs of the
| child. Also they're children. They haven't learned how to
| behave like adults yet. Expecting them to do so is cruel.
| civilized wrote:
| But you've defined education as learning how things are
| out there in the real world, including bullying which
| prevents children from getting what people traditionally
| called education.
|
| What if most people don't _want_ this type of education?
| Are they wrong? Do you have the moral authority to force
| it on them?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional
| lives early so that they grow up with the capability of
| empathy towards others.
|
| You say children should learn this, and then you say that
| this is because they will have some new capacity for
| empathy they wouldn't otherwise have.
|
| I see no reason to believe this proposition is true. What
| if instead, when they learn this, it just makes them more
| vulnerable to various kinds of dysfunction themselves?
| What if, even if learning about this is a good thing,
| it's only a good thing when they're well on their way to
| adulthood?
|
| You have no real evidence of cause and effect here. Just
| a lazy asumption. "But when I learned of this, I
| immediately had intense feelings of empathy!" doesn't
| mean much because you're not even a single data point,
| but an anecdote. Self-reported. And not a young child.
|
| > or caffeine abuse with any weight whatsoever
|
| This is coming from someone who would legalize heroin,
| cocaine, and meth and sell it from liquor stores: no one
| ever sucked cock in the alley behind the pawn shop for a
| hit of caffeine. It's not in the same category.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Nah, looking back on it, there was no learning about
| dysfunctional lives, it was just absolutely misery.
| Emotional and physical bullying, fear, intimidation, and
| misery. If a child is disruptive to other students and
| impinging on their opportunity to learn they should be
| removed from the classroom. It's not the school's job to
| teach discipline. Removing them from the class puts the
| burden on the parents and the administration, instead of
| the kids.
| busterarm wrote:
| School isn't really just there to teach you facts, it's
| to prepare you for life as an adult. You are going to
| deal with bullies your whole life and you'd better be
| well prepared for it before you're out on your own as an
| adult.
| candiodari wrote:
| You're going to learn to avoid bullies entirely and live
| the remainder of your life without them, is what you
| mean.
|
| As to how 18 years of being forced into a small room with
| them helps prepare you for that, I hope you'll enlighten
| me.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > You are going to deal with bullies your whole life
|
| Never dealt with them again once I left high school. Not
| even any close calls.
|
| That shit's like living in a war zone. No one sends their
| kids to a war zone so they can "learn to survive". No
| good lessons exist in a war zone, not even in between
| people stepping on landmines or getting pulverized by
| airstrikes.
|
| All that exists in such a place is a bunch of trauma, and
| yes, debilitating/mutilative injuries, for those that
| somehow manage to get sneak back out of them.
|
| Bullying is like this too, though obviously to a lesser
| degree.
|
| I strongly suspect that most people get their ideas about
| what bullying is from the same half-dozen made-for-tv
| movies and other narrative fragments thereof on the
| subject.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >It's not the school's job to teach discipline. Removing
| them from the class puts the burden on the parents and
| the administration
|
| No, all it does is make sure that any child with a bad
| home life has no future. Sure, it solves the "problem" of
| making one teacher manage 30 kids meaning one kid can
| DDoS the system but it does that by ignoring it all
| together.
|
| Mom's a teacher, and "bad" kids LOVE her because she's
| extremely good at her job. Those bad kids pretty much
| universally just need attention because they get none in
| normal life. There are still occasionally young
| psychopaths but they generally do get expelled at some
| point. Otherwise most bad kids would come do their
| homework in her class because she was basically the only
| adult in the building they respected. She was literally
| "just" a french teacher but because she understands what
| it means to be a teacher she was an intervention for many
| a "bad" kid.
|
| You want one bad kid to not spoil the bunch? Stop making
| undertrained, underpaid "teachers" without even an
| education degree oversee a class of 30 kids. How good
| could one person possibly manage 30 adults, let alone
| kids. Stop hiring glorified baby sitters because that's
| all you can get for $30k a year in salary. Stop treating
| teaching like a disposable profession.
| busterarm wrote:
| Also it's not always the kid's home life that's the
| problem.
|
| Teachers can be bad and do have the capability to pick on
| children. Having these kinds of outcomes totally allows a
| teacher to single out a child they don't like and wreck
| their whole life.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| > Kids should learn that other people have dysfunctional
| lives early so that they grow up with the capability of
| empathy towards others.
|
| They should learn by being subjected to the effects of
| their dysfunction? I honestly don't grasp this strategy.
| It's like saying that we should learn that some people
| are psychopaths by going to live with them..
| tivert wrote:
| > which you're now throwing them into full time.
|
| Is that really possible in the US? IIRC, the government
| has a mandate to educate _every_ child, including those
| that are extremely developmentally disabled (which is why
| special education is such a huge item in school budgets).
| If a kid is expelled from school, wouldn 't the district
| be legally required to find some alternative arrangement?
| zdragnar wrote:
| No, the parent is. Worst case, they can be home schooled.
|
| Despite being treated as such, schools are not day cares,
| and parents still have some responsibility for the
| upbringing of their children. If the kid misbehaves
| enough, it is on the parent.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The school cannot fix the home life, so it should not
| try.
|
| Home life should be addressed by child services, etc.
| Granted in reality they are often as understaffed or as
| incompetent and corrupt as any other government service,
| but at least that's their mission. School teachers should
| not be doubling as social workers.
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| And this feel-goodism causes serious long-term harm. It's
| better to discipline people displaying rogue behavior when
| they're young. This feel-goodism just pushes the
| consequences to when these people get old, and they end up
| in prison, unemployed, working dead-end jobs, or something
| similar...at that point no one cares because they assume
| the person is an adult that can take care of themselves.
| busterarm wrote:
| I was the disruptive kid in public school (although I'd blame
| it on excessive and biased attention from teachers and
| teachers not in control over their egos) and I was indeed
| kicked out of class and eventually given the ultimatum of be
| medicated into submission or be expelled.
|
| The next year I was at the private school across the street.
| Suddenly I wasn't a problem child anymore there.
|
| I had already been taught algebra at home by first grade. I
| was in the "gifted program" in public school and the
| curriculum was still boring and slow. Teachers lasered in on
| my boredom and made my life miserable despite (or perhaps
| because of) being able to answer anything. I thrived a little
| more in private school in part because the children were on-
| average smarter but also because instead of the school
| treating everyone like they were special and going to save
| the world (and rewarding only the kids they liked) they
| taught children the value of group conformity and not being
| the nail that sticks up.
| themitigating wrote:
| What made them like a student over another? Behavior?
| Ability?
|
| How/why were students they liked rewarded? Teaching is a
| job, there are tests and many times grading is subjective.
| The only factors I thought would come into play are.
|
| 1. How much the student tried, cared, or showed interest
| during class
|
| 2. The content of the test (answers-objective, writing-
| subjective)
|
| 3. If they were disruptive in class which normally led to 1
| and 2 being negative
|
| What unjustified reasons would a teacher have to show
| favoritism to a portion of students excluding rare
| situations like sexual relations and nepotism?
|
| --------
|
| "because instead of the school treating everyone like they
| were special and going to save the world"
|
| How? When I was in school I went from class to class where
| the teacher would read material, show examples (i.e.) math,
| or have a class discussion. Do you mean they inflated
| grades? Then you wouldn't have done poorly in public school
| as you said.
|
| If you mean they verbally told students they were doing
| good when they weren't why would they do that? Public
| school students have to take standardized test which are so
| important for the school that it's a common complaint that
| teachers only teach the test. If this is the case how does
| rewarding unworthy students benefit the teacher or school.
| Why would they do that?
|
| ----
|
| Your comment hit a nerve because it is very dense with
| political talking points.
|
| - public school teachers are corrupt (i.e.favoritism )
|
| - public school teachers are bad at their job
|
| - public school teachers are too soft and treat kids like
| snowflakes and this has a negative affect.
| busterarm wrote:
| > What made them like a student over another? Behavior?
| Ability?
|
| Between my experience and the data I would say it comes
| down to class and gender, but maybe in the reverse order.
|
| In my primary school education, both public and private,
| there was a pervasive and often oppressive favoritism
| towards the girls in just about all situations.
|
| We've been starting to see the results of this in the
| data for the last couple of decades where men have worse
| education outcomes by a sizable percentage.
| themitigating wrote:
| I'm not sure how that relates to my comment which was a
| response to a private vs public school comment.
| knome wrote:
| >they taught children the value of group conformity and not
| being the nail that sticks up
|
| That seems like an awful lesson to impose on children.
| "Keep your head down and don't do anything to attract
| attention. Go to your grave having spent your life hiding
| among the faceless crowd".
|
| Shitty teachers that play favorites won't not exist in a
| private setting. Shitty teachers that demand abject
| compliance from students to soothe their egos won't not
| exist in a private setting.
|
| It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the education
| of 30 others, so teachers punished them more than the other
| students? They should have probably kicked you ahead a
| grade if you were so far ahead of your peers, but that
| would require someone in the situation to attribute your
| behavior to boredom rather than mere defiance. Did your
| parents not suggest such a thing? Was it not an option for
| some other reason? It sounds like a change of environment
| brought you away from old grievances and that the increased
| coursework gave you something to do. It's completely
| possible that a grade skip in the same school could have
| done the same.
| busterarm wrote:
| > That seems like an awful lesson to impose on children.
| "Keep your head down and don't do anything to attract
| attention. Go to your grave having spent your life hiding
| among the faceless crowd".
|
| It's a crucial survival skill. You learn when and where
| in your life to apply it. The "lesson" is that the whole
| world doesn't revolve around you. Please keep me away
| from the karens that _haven't_ yet learned that about
| life.
|
| > It sounds like a bored student was disrupting the
| education of 30 others, so teachers punished them more
| than the other students? They should have probably kicked
| you ahead a grade if you were so far ahead of your peers,
| but that would require someone in the situation to
| attribute your behavior to boredom rather than mere
| defiance. Did your parents not suggest such a thing? Was
| it not an option for some other reason? It sounds like a
| change of environment brought you away from old
| grievances and that the increased coursework gave you
| something to do. It's completely possible that a grade
| skip in the same school could have done the same.
|
| Most of my time in that school was fine, I just got
| unlucky one year and got a nasty old tenured b* of a
| teacher who decided from day one that she hated me and
| directed constant negative attention towards me. I just
| wanted to be left alone. I had had 5 consistent years at
| that school already without problems, but she was besties
| with the principal. Later on in her career she got
| rubberroomed by the school board, so I don't think the
| problem was me here.
| knome wrote:
| >they taught children the value of group conformity and
| not being the nail that sticks up
|
| >The "lesson" is that the whole world doesn't revolve
| around you
|
| These strike me as very different things.
|
| Teaching kids to remain grounded, respectful of others
| and how to live within an existing system is one thing.
|
| The former sounds like teaching them to avoid garnering
| attention at all, which is quite another.
|
| I've read about cultures where standing out, for good or
| bad, is socially punished. "The tallest blade of grass is
| the first to be mowed down". I would not want us to
| foster such a culture here.
|
| I could agree with "don't stand out for the wrong
| reasons".
|
| >Most of my time in that school was fine
|
| It doesn't seem this has much to do with the debate
| between public and charter schools at all. Just a poor
| experience you unfortunate enough to have gone through.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The public school I went to was worse. If you were attacked
| by one of those disruptive kids you'd be suspended for
| starting a fight.
| brvsft wrote:
| My middle school was like this. They had a "zero tolerance"
| policy on fights, which meant if you were in one, you were
| supposed to get suspended.
|
| In reality, it did not actually work this way. I did get
| into at least one fight where administration got involved,
| and they let me off the hook. (Neither of us got suspended,
| in fact.) In my own view, I 'started' that fight although I
| did not 'instigate' it, not that the difference matters
| much. Some kid in line for PE kept kicking the back of my
| shoes, and after the fourth or fifth time, I started
| punching him.
| dev_daftly wrote:
| That's because of "zero-tolerance" policies, which never
| made any sense.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I always say the best way to solve Zero Tolerance
| policies is to threaten to replace the management with a
| minimum wage box-checker. If we aren't getting any
| discretion or thought why pay more for it? You would see
| quite the shift from acting like lazy ass-covering
| automatons.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| This comes up a lot, but similar to people complaining
| about wikipedia reverting their edits, no one seems to even
| care if it is on balance a good policy or not. They're too
| caught up in their own injustice.
|
| Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, I don't know but I have
| to at least consider that a few innocent kids getting
| suspended unfairly for being attacked might be worth it if
| it prevents more attacks that escalate further.
|
| You could even argue the opposite, that if you're going to
| get suspended for being attacked you might as well try to
| bite their ear off and go down fighting, but no one does,
| they just focus on the innocent kid getting suspended.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| So when you get jumped in a hallway, a concussion so hard
| you black out, multiple broken ribs from being kicked
| while on the ground & then you wake up in a hospital with
| no memory of the event, you should consider that it is OK
| you got suspended for getting your ass beat?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| A good example of my point. So you don't even care if the
| policy helps other kids avoid that same fate, it's just a
| point of principle to you and you're happy to see them go
| to hospital with concussion?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > a few innocent kids getting suspended unfairly for
| being attacked might be worth it if it prevents more
| attacks that escalate further
|
| What is it with education that makes people so willing to
| internalize well known Fascist values?
|
| Acceptance of that thought is common; of collective
| punishment is common; blatant repression is advocated
| everywhere. If you take the values of a common school and
| try to apply them to adults, you will get either punched
| away or arrested.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > a few innocent kids getting suspended unfairly for
| being attacked might be worth it if it prevents more
| attacks that escalate further.
|
| Kids being unfairly punished for being attacked
| encourages more attacks, though, especially if it is
| punishing all participants regardless of role in a manner
| that is less of a punishment for the kind of people who
| would be inclined to attack and more of a punishment to
| those who would not.
| specialist wrote:
| Huh.
|
| I categorically oppose "zero tolerance". It removes
| judgement, ignores context. It's a strategy for
| bureaucrats to absolve themselves of responsibilty.
|
| But I actually don't know if it's better, worse, or
| indifferent. If it proves a net win, I might change my
| stance.
|
| Please share if you find any such research. Thanks.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| An injust policy is not a good policy by definition.
| There is a reason "better a hundred guilty go free than
| one innocent should suffer" is an axiom. To do otherwise
| utterly fucks with incentives and promotes selfishness in
| the worst of ways. Why bother being honest if it is no
| protection? Do whatever the fuck you can get away with
| and maximize the personal advantage. That is a recipe for
| breakdown. Injustice has a way of creating a "karmic
| backlash" of reputations which is less than precise. Not
| through any cosmic force but that in a world with
| billions of agents actions begetting reactions. It goes
| beyond classic vigilantism and into reputations in
| general. Letting the Mai Lai Massacre go unpunished
| certainly contributed to Vietnam Veterans branded baby-
| killers.
|
| On another note I highly suspect residual trauma is a
| reason for teachers having issues with parents, and
| schools with willingness to fund. The tree remembers and
| assumes the worst of teachers based upon their own
| experience.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| It hasn't been that way for a long time, but it used to be.
| And I can say that as a disruptive kid that was kicked out of
| a school. I then had to go through middle school in a special
| school for kids kicked out of other schools. Thankfully, they
| knew what they were doing when it came to getting kids back
| in line, and I turned out pretty okay in my book.
| jacknews wrote:
| Indeed, and the assertion that 'only poor kids together' will
| behave even worse certainly needs backing up with data.
|
| It seems obvious to me (since the experiment is repeated over
| and over within millions of families) that environment plays a
| major role in behaviour, but tbh I don't see good behaviour
| rubbing off onto the 'bad' kids in a mixed setting, it's almost
| always the other way around, or at best, a productive
| environment is disrupted by a few troublemakers.
|
| So 'good' kids should get an environment free of disruption so
| they can do what they do. And the 'bad' kids should get an
| environment _much_ more focused on encouraging good behaviour,
| so they learn to do the good stuff too. Win-win.
| II2II wrote:
| Except you run into a few problems when implementing that,
| especially for public schools.
|
| Proactive parents will typically want their children in good
| schools, regardless of their child's behavioural history.
| (This doesn't mean they refuse to acknowledge the issue,
| though some will. It simply means they want their children to
| have access to better supports.)
|
| There is an overarching philosophy within the school system
| that integration is better than separation. I don't know if
| this has to be the case, but it has been historically true.
| Think of it this way: even though some of the best teachers
| may want to serve the most challenging schools, good teachers
| almost always want to teach in good schools. Where does that
| leave the challenging schools? If they're lucky, with _a_
| great teacher. More often, with a bunch of mediocre teachers.
|
| Related to that, schools rarely have the resources to
| distinguish between students who would benefit from
| integration and those who would benefit from specialized and
| separate programs.
| jacknews wrote:
| I don't think you should segregate schools. Just
| classrooms. That gives students in 'bad' classes something
| to aspire to, and keeps them on the map rather than being
| written-off to a 'poor school', and parents should realise
| that, though their kid is in the 'bad' class, they are
| getting appropriate help, not just being discarded.
|
| In some ways, the 'best' teachers should be assigned to the
| 'bad' kids, certainly those with the best command of a
| class. The 'good' kids don't need that so much.
| kelipso wrote:
| I think you do want the "good" kids to be taught by the
| best teachers. That way they'll have better chances to
| succeed and you won't have so many good teachers get
| burnt out. I think people should just normalize sort of
| giving up on the "bad" kids and send them to the
| delinquents school or military school or whatever. The
| whole idea of having the best teachers teach the "bad"
| kids is completely wasteful of limited resources.
| coredog64 wrote:
| These kids are still going to be on the bus, at recess,
| or at school functions. Not sure if you were ever
| bullied, but all three of those are prime locations due
| to lack of adult supervision.
| jacknews wrote:
| I mean bullying is a thing worldwide to some extent, but
| I think America needs to fix it's high school culture. If
| not it's entire, aggressive culture.
| themitigating wrote:
| Bullying is worldwide but to the same frequency and
| intensity?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| IIRC bullying is much worse in East Asia
| (Korea/Japan/China)
| [deleted]
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I think you still need something to incentivise the best
| teachers to voluntarily sign up for the lowest performing
| classes. Obviously its way more prestigious to be the
| teacher with all the ivy league destined students than
| the teacher whose students are just trying to get set up
| for a community college or a blue collar apprenticeship.
| [This is not to say the latter cohort is less
| intelligent, capable, or important-- just less
| prestigious.]
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| The right answer is probably to pay the teachers of the
| problem kids more or adjust student teacher ratios- For
| example, with no behavior problems a single math teacher
| could probably handle instructing and grading 50
| students, as this is the model in college calc.
| scythe wrote:
| >There is an overarching philosophy within the school
| system that integration is better than separation.
|
| I don't think it's fair to Black or female students to
| equate their integration with the "integration" of students
| who are _specifically_ disruptive.
| themitigating wrote:
| "Proactive parents will typically want their children in
| good schools, regardless of their child's behavioural
| history"
|
| Why wouldn't this apply to private schools especially
| because in that situation parent's have financial leverage?
|
| Edit Another comment said that private schools have an
| incentive to provide a good service otherwise people will
| take their money and leave. I want to temper my statment
| about parent's changing schools because
|
| 1. Unlike grocery stores or gas stations how many schools
| would be within reasonable distance where a parent could
| easily change.
|
| 2. "Customers take their money and leave" doesn't seem to
| happen that often with every other business. It's a
| constant theme here where we complain about the general
| public continuing to use substandard products. Yes it's a
| serious product (child's education) but factor in my
| points.
|
| 3. Changing schools could be traumatic for a child because
| they made friends, comfortable with teachers, familiar with
| the school. School isn't where you buy gas or go to the
| gym. Children are young AND emotional, stability is
| probably ideal. This means parents don't have as much
| leverage as I first stated
|
| 4. What metric do parents use? Grades, bullying?
|
| If grades schools will have a financial incentive to
| inflate more than public schools. Public schools and
| private both have standardized tests, however a report card
| from a private school is a subjective judgements from the
| teacher that the parent will use as a metric
|
| If bullying and a parent complains once should the other
| child be expelled? How does this system work? What if there
| are no witnesses, bully denies it. What about verbal abuse,
| what if no one hears it?
|
| If private schools start expelling bullies why aren't they
| required to teach children like public schools. Charter
| schools are supposed to be about a parents choice why
| should a child, bully or not, have less rights especially
| since they receive public money.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Only, the measure of what constitutes 'bad behavior' is
| inconsistent as heck. I had cerebral palsy and undiagnosed
| ADHD as a kid and was constantly being sent to the principles
| office for simply 'spacing out' and getting distracted. I
| would have been royally screwed if I had been diverted to a
| school for kids with behavioral problems. Eventually I got
| glasses, got medicated, and thrived, but there were a lot of
| people who wanted to write me off without giving me a chance.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That still only goes so far because sometimes its a disrupted
| life at home that causes the in class disruptions.
| danaris wrote:
| While there's obvious classism (and very-slightly-more-veiled
| racism) in the assumptions that "poor kids" will be more
| disruptive in class, there is, to my understanding,
| substantial data backing up the perception, with causal
| mechanisms that have nothing to do with race or "poor
| breeding", and everything to do with how grindingly awful it
| is to be poor in America.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| > While there's obvious classism (and very-slightly-more-
| veiled racism)
|
| I don't get the mind reading. Why? It's like we read
| completely different posts.
| TimedToasts wrote:
| It's just a bad-faith take, ascribing intentions as a
| smear on the OP.
| jacknews wrote:
| Sure, and in fact it's not only about poverty, I think
| there are some relatively wealthy (maybe white) kids who
| struggle because their families are dysfunctional, it's all
| about their close environment.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Agreed, and to the parent comment's point, I believe the
| studies that prove this have already been done, it's just
| that they study the material effects of poverty in america,
| so they're more specific than 'poverty'
|
| Kids have more behavior problems and remember things poorly
| when they're hungry.
|
| Kids that don't have a stable housing situation struggle to
| focus in school.
|
| Kids with untreated medical problems struggle to focus in
| school.
|
| Kids with absent parents (like a parent that tries to work
| multiple jobs) struggle in school
|
| Kids with parents in unstable relationships (poverty screws
| up relationships and forces people into suboptimal
| relationships to combine resources) do poorly in school and
| are more susceptible to abuse
|
| Kids that are the victim of abuse struggle to focus in
| school.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Seems that the biggest problem all relates to an unstable
| family life.
|
| Hey you guys remember when in the 80s we convinced all
| the women that it would be empowering and freeing to
| start slaving away as a corporate drone and that would be
| the best life for them, that kids didn't need 2 parents
| at home?
|
| Isn't it great how that panned out.
|
| EDIT
|
| To be clear I'm not saying women shouldn't be in the
| workforce, but the fact of the matter is that at some
| point they convinced us all we had to have 2 parents
| working and that's when things went to hell. It was great
| for a little bit while everyone was making a bit of extra
| cash, but basically what happened was the supply of labor
| doubled, and when supply goes up...
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > I'm not saying women shouldn't be in the workforce
|
| Whether you intended to or not, it is _exactly_ what you
| were saying.
| jacknews wrote:
| sure everything would be rosy if women just spent their
| time breastfeeding somewhere near the sink or cooker.
| keenboy wrote:
| We've fallen prey to the philosophy that being at home
| with kids isn't adding value to society. You should be
| out making some big corporation wealthy!
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I don't think you understand: poor women have never been
| able to afford to be a stay at home mother. Stay at home
| motherhood has _always_ been a middle class and above
| lifestyle. Wealthier women employ the nannies and maids
| that are obviously overwhelmingly women who aren 't at
| home.
|
| I wouldn't attribute a lack of home stability to women
| empowerment. A lack of home stability is often caused by
| poverty. A poor mother cannot afford not to work, cannot
| afford suitable environments to raise her children while
| she works, and must make difficult decisions regarding
| proper nourishment/safe place to sleep/access to
| utilities/physical presence.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Historically poor, married women did tend to stay at
| home, but frequently worked from the home sewing,
| washing, small scale manufacturing etc... The Industrial
| Revolution reduced the value of that kind of work though.
|
| Until near the middle of the century running a household
| of as too time intensive for most women to go off to
| work.
|
| Nannies and maids were generally unmarried, childless
| women.
|
| I'm the early 20th century only 5% of married women
| worked outside the home in the US
| https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-history-of-womens-
| wor...
|
| Also only about 7% of children lived with single mothers
| in 1900.
| keenboy wrote:
| You're not looking back far enough historically.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| This used to be the case. Even in rural Wyoming. In each
| region there were at least one military-style dedicated boys
| school and girls school focused on disciplining bad students.
| Public school students would receive a few detentions and
| suspensions, followed soon after by expulsion to the boys
| school. Parents could also voluntarily and temporarily enroll
| their kid there if they needed disciplinary help.
|
| The boys school had a good reputation and would have
| engagement with the local schools via sports and dances.
| JediWing wrote:
| This is absolutely a huge factor, if not the biggest factor in
| education: kids who are actively disruptive and harmful to the
| learning of others being kept in with other kids, draining all
| of the attention from the teacher.
|
| The causes and solutions are not as simple as "these kids are
| bad, kick them out of school", but any solution needs to
| involve kids who aren't disruptive and WANT to learn getting an
| environment conducive to that.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| its worse than that, i have some examples of what always
| annoyed me:
|
| - a terrible kid was constantly given presents from a
| teacher, chocolates, and small things she could give him so
| that he would stop misbehaving in class. normally these
| prizes would go to a single student every day, for merit, but
| once this terrible person kept getting them, everyone else
| became pissed and demoralized.
|
| - the young kids copy the teachers behavior, and it creates
| this culture of "they have a harder life than you" when
| trying to complain about the terrible students in their
| vicinity (which i completely disagree with, they're not
| trying hard at all that's why they get like this), so when
| terrible people bully decent, kind, and hardworking students,
| there's no sympathy for the hardworking students. they get
| treated like shit and abused from the future-criminals who do
| nothing but degrade the experience of everyone who attends,
| then they get told "get over it, you have everything" by
| their peers who for whatever reason weren't bullied, and
| refuse to help. its cult-like behavior
|
| - you also have kids who are way too old for their grade, by
| at least 4 years. someone who should otherwise be way ahead
| of the classroom they're in is 2x the size of anyone else, is
| a literal delinquent, and is for some reason still allowed in
| the public school system where they either terrorize their
| classmates, get them into their same terrible habits, or
| bully people who express any kind of discontent with their
| behavior.
| tivert wrote:
| >> I went to public school as a kid and the disruptive kids
| were expelled. Not just kicked out of class - totally kicked
| out of school and told to find a new one! One reason I send
| my kids to private school is if you don't want to learn they
| will kick you out. In public schools today you get a few bad
| kids and it ruins the whole class.
|
| > The causes and solutions are not as simple as "these kids
| are bad, kick them out of school", but any solution needs to
| involve kids who aren't disruptive and WANT to learn getting
| an environment conducive to that.
|
| But it might not be that much more complicated. It's been a
| long time since I've been in school, but in our district
| there was an "alternative" high school, which had a
| reputation among the kids as the place you'd end up if you
| were too much of a behavior problem.
|
| That said, the kids at my schools were well-behaved in class
| and I never knew of anyone specific who was expelled.
|
| If behavior problems are getting more widespread, maybe
| embracing more of an explicit containment strategy is
| appropriate.
| JediWing wrote:
| It's sad but I largely agree.
|
| The complicated part is the "why" of their behavior, which
| can range from an antisocial personality disorder, to not
| getting enough attention at home.
|
| Sadly many of the cause of behavior problems is from
| systemic issues like poverty, or poor mental health
| services across the country.
|
| The bottom line is that neither the kids nor the teachers
| want to, or deserve to, deal with the byproduct of other
| failed systems.
|
| The failed systems should be fixed, and services provided
| to these kids to the extent possible, but OUTSIDE of a
| classroom setting.
|
| The cost of past failures can't be borne by the students
| and teachers in the public school system.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The complicated part is the "why" of their behavior
|
| You can have specialized people look at the "why" after
| you remove the disruptive (some times dangerously
| disruptive) person from forced prolonged contact with
| innocent ones.
|
| It's certainly very good to look and fight the causes; as
| it's important to give the people chances to go back on
| track, and protect them at that new environment too. But
| forcefully submitting everybody else to them is just
| horrible.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > they are behavioral consultants rather than teachers
|
| During covid, someone observed that it exposed the primary role
| of public schools to be day care.
| analog31 wrote:
| Except there must be a difference between school and day care
| because the kids who stayed home during covid are now way
| behind academically.
| themitigating wrote:
| What makes a private school more likely to expell children?
|
| Since they are a for profit enterprise, unlike public schools,
| wouldn't there be a financial incentive to have as many
| customers as possible?
|
| In one particular area what is the reason a charter school
| would be better than a public school. Since the entry factor
| for most (excluding schools for smart kids) is money why
| wouldn't the same problems occur at a charter school? Finally,
| why can't we just fix public schools?
| mhb wrote:
| _What makes a private school more likely to expell children?_
|
| Uh, because more customers will leave if the private school
| is no better than a public school.
| conception wrote:
| It's a business where all the customers interact with one
| another. If it costs more in complaints, then you drop the
| bad apple.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Because the paying customers will go elsewhere if they allow
| another paying customer to ruin it. They want 20 to stay even
| if they have to lose the 21st payer.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The private schools are seeking and selling quality. Plus,
| the majority of private schools are non-profits. Many are
| religiously affiliated and would like a large population as
| as a potential source of new religious members, but they also
| need some way to fund that. If a family is already paying
| $5k/yr in property taxes it is less likely they can afford
| another $10/yr for 2 kids to go to private school. The
| funding is the biggest blocker to increased private and
| charter school attendance. That's why there's so much talk
| about things like vouchers, 529s, etc.
|
| "Finally, why can't we just fix public schools?"
|
| That's a good question without a good answer. Perhaps the
| best answer is the meta that people don't agree on the course
| of action that would "fix" the schools since there are
| numerous opinions on what that is, resulting in no action or
| half measures.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| Many public schools simply cannot expel problem students.
|
| The school district must educate everyone. When a school
| expels or excludes a student that student is still a live
| human that must somehow be educated. They may need to be
| bussed somewhere. Or to be sent to another school in another
| district. All of this is very expensive. Never mind that
| someone needs to administer this.
|
| So in a public school expelling a student increases costs
| significantly, several fold. In a private school, it
| decreases costs. The private school just tells you to hit the
| road.
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| "bad" kids don't need discipline, they need help - of course
| they don't behave well when there's 0 modeling at home, it's
| not because someone isn't yelling at them enough - raising a
| child "takes a village" and many of us aren't operating within
| a village anymore, we're all stressed out and working too much
| monero-xmr wrote:
| This is why if I had to teach I would teach college kids. I
| don't want to be a therapist and bear the weight of all
| parents' failures. I want to teach math. So if to be a public
| school K-12 teacher you have to also "model" how to be a
| functional human (as the kids go home and see the opposite)
| then I would never accept that job.
|
| I was raised by a single mom who worked a million hours and
| didn't have a baby sitter when I let myself in after school.
| Don't see how "working too many hours and being stressed" is
| a new phenomenon because most of my extended family is poor
| and have always been. My mom told me not to steal and don't
| be an obnoxious asshole in school, wasn't exactly rocket
| science.
| mbork_pl wrote:
| While (as a former math teacher, btw) I sympathize with
| you, let me point out that absolutely _every_ teacher
| should "model how to be a functional human" (and in fact
| does, better or worse). This is true for every stage of
| education, from kindergarten to a university.
| briHass wrote:
| Discipline does work; it's ultimately what the 'bad' kids get
| when they have runins with the criminal justice system.
|
| The lack of discipline from the parents, mentors, and
| teachers early on is why the State has to do it later.
| Discipline is not orthogonal to 'help'.
| afavour wrote:
| > Discipline does work; it's ultimately what the 'bad' kids
| get when they have runins with the criminal justice system.
|
| ...and does that work? Recidivism rates would suggest
| otherwise.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| If you want to treat crime through a disease model, then
| you should quarantine the infected and prevent
| transmissions, eg by them victimizing more people.
|
| Somehow, that part of medicine never makes it into these
| "alternatives" -- which makes claims of "systems
| thinking" or "crime as disease" sound like shallow
| pretenses for performative virtue rather than legitimate
| considered policy.
| afavour wrote:
| At no point did I say I wanted to treat crime through a
| disease model so your "shallow pretense" dismissal feels
| out of place.
|
| All I'm saying is that it's pretty obvious jailing
| criminals is incredibly expensive and not particularly
| effective at reducing future crime.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Considering a large experiment has just occurred with
| progressive prosecutors no longer putting criminals in
| jail, and the SF prosecutor was recalled and a tough-on-
| crime mayor was elected in NYC, I think the results are
| that "throwing criminals in jail" works better than not.
| afavour wrote:
| As an NYC resident I can assure you in at least one of
| those examples you are vastly, vastly oversimplifying
| matters.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Both examples are silly and bad. Alameda County (Oakland)
| elected a tough on crime DA at about the same time as
| SF's "reform" one and their crime rate increased more
| than SFs in that period.. there are no easy answers in
| policing or discipline.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| Yes the "crime rate" when no one goes through the hassle
| to report petty crimes because it's a pain in the ass and
| they won't solve it anyway. The stats are a joke and
| everyone knows it.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yeah except for this conversation, we're clearly talking
| about violent crime which increased in Oakland at a rate
| far greater than it did in SF.. and I can't imagine your
| contention that the people of San Francisco are less
| likely to report violent crime compared to people living
| 10 miles away..
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| To be fair, theres no way to reliably control for the
| affect of the da without a parallel universe with a weak
| on crime oakland da. Especially when certain violent
| crimes like murder are so rare in the population to begin
| with where a single multiple shooting event could skew
| things significantly year over year.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yep. No argument there. Which definitely cuts both ways
| though. The 'weak on crime' DA in SF was lambasted and
| ultimately recalled for a crime spike that was smaller in
| magnitude than the crime spike in much of the country in
| areas with all manner of DAs and Policing policies.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The justice system is punishment. Proper disciplining would
| help foster _discipline_ in the individual with teaching
| and guidance on how to make good choices and conform with
| those consistently.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I'm not going to be able to convince you otherwise if this
| is a strongly held belief, but once a kid (or anyone) is in
| the criminal justice system they're pretty much doomed.
| I've seen this time and time again, it's all punishment and
| very little help. We literally enslave inmates in some
| states, they're picking cotton on former slave plantations.
| We need to get over this concept of punishment only.
|
| > Discipline is not orthogonal to 'help'.
|
| Yes, but discipline alone will never work. Never has.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| >> We need to get over this concept of punishment only.
|
| And replace it with what?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Rehabilitation. We need to help people understand why
| they're constantly angry and impulsive, it can not be
| beaten out of them. For some people this can take a
| lifetime of mental health counseling.
|
| I've seen irate voters at town meetings upset that tax
| dollars were being using to pay for _books and tutoring_
| for inmates, let alone mental health counseling. As a
| country the US is incredibly far off from the mindset of
| prisoner rehabilitation. We treat prisoners like animals,
| and for some reason are surprised when they keep acting
| like animals.
| robnado wrote:
| Or you can teach the normal kids how to defend themselves
| and unite against the bully.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Depends on the circumstances. If someone gets a life
| sentence, then it's probably not a benefit to society to
| work on rehabilitation. If someone gets 5 years or so for
| a non-violent offense, then perhaps providing resources
| that foster hope of permanent change could benefit
| society rather than derail them from society entirely
| just to punish them. That can be a balance many factors,
| such as a display of discipline through good behavior in
| jail/prison, work release, learning a skill/trade so one
| can get a job to support themselves (the primary
| precursor to being a benefit to society), and some sort
| of job placement assistance or at least the removal of so
| many barriers.
|
| Some of these exist to some degree already. Some of the
| issues are systemic and not just related to those in
| prison. For example, the decline of real wages over the
| past 50 years and the rise of barriers to entry for many
| things (renting, jobs, etc) has made it difficult for
| lower skilled individuals to succeed. If you feel you
| have no hope in the system, then you will be more
| inclined to act outside the system.
|
| None of this is an excuse for someone to break the law,
| merely an observation that the current system might not
| be maximizing societal benefits but rather too focused on
| punishment alone.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| goda90 wrote:
| Yelling isn't the only form of discipline. There's
| withholding privileges. There's physical restraint even.
| Without cooperation from parents, school staff can't really
| do either. A teacher I know tells me how some of the violent
| elementary school children just get put in a room alone when
| they are having an episode because that's all they are
| allowed to do. These children (under 12 years old) have sent
| teachers to urgent care with injuries, and the kids are let
| back to school not long after.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| physical restraint and discipline addresses a symptom, not
| the cause -- if discipline worked the US wouldn't have
| outrageously high prison population and recidivism rates
| goda90 wrote:
| The US justice system isn't discipline. It's punishment.
| Discipline isn't just giving consequences for actions,
| but it's also giving tools to choose better actions.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| On that I agree, but specifying "discipline" for the
| average person often means punishment only. This is why
| the prison system is the way it is... no one wants to pay
| for things that benefit the prisoners, just the
| punishment.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| JediWing wrote:
| Agreed, but teachers can't be expected to be the only ones
| providing this help.
|
| Other public institutions outside the school system need to
| be in place to support the parents who are stressed and
| overworked and barely have time to parent.
|
| And their right to be helped stops at the line where they're
| causing harm to the learning of others.
|
| Discipline in schools isn't and cannot be about holistically
| reforming the problem kids, it's about making sure those who
| want to learn can.
|
| You can't dump the entirety of systemic poverty, racism,
| mental health, etc. on the education system and expect it to
| work well.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yep, but also many schools in the US don't even have the
| basics AND they're getting all of that stuff dumped on
| them. Teachers are quitting at alarming rates since the
| pandemic. This is not being treated remotely like the
| emergency it is, and 10 years from now we're really going
| to feel it.
| giantg2 wrote:
| '"bad" kids don't need discipline, they need help'
|
| Some would argue that disciplining is helpful in many cases.
| Proper disciplining is not just punishment but should include
| an explaination of why what they did was wrong and what the
| right thing to do is.
|
| Kids _having_ discipline is a slightly different topic, but
| can be partially built through the process above.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Discipline without love or some care starts to look like
| authoritarianism, so if you're not careful you can instill
| a strong sense of oppositional defiance and make things
| worse.
|
| This is a very difficult problem to solve and people will
| often support the stick and complain that someone doesn't
| deserve the carrot. Everyone needs both.
| MisterTea wrote:
| A friend taught public school in a poorer area outside of DC
| for about 8 years until moving into admin. He had one tactic
| that worked for many "bad" kids - call their parents, in the
| middle of the class if need be. He said today's young
| teachers, are non-confrontational and not used to verbal
| communication over phones as they were raised on social media
| and texting. So those young teachers sit there helpless while
| the student runs wild.
|
| Now in admin hes some kind of teacher manager and he had
| teachers come to him, sometimes physically crying, unable to
| deal with a child with a behavioral problem. His says 99% of
| the time these problems are corrected with a single phone
| call to the parents. Just one call but no - young teachers
| these days don't have the guts or social wherewithal. So his
| job is now teaching adults how to make phone calls.
|
| Another thing to realize is a lot of these kids do respond
| positively to teachers when they show them that they care and
| aren't there to simply baby sit and yell at them. He has had
| many students come to him later on thanking him for breaking
| their balls and setting them on the right path. Kids aren't
| stupid - they want respect but are treated like little
| monsters to be corralled and controlled like cattle.
|
| Showing the kids you truly care is incredibly powerful for
| them - it connects at the human emotional level and those
| positive interactions boosts the kids moral and they feel
| more confident or centered in life.
| XVincentX wrote:
| Reminds me a lot what Thomas Sowell says in Charter School and
| Their Enemies book
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