When we talk about school choice, one aspect of it that I don’t see discussed enough is the effect that our current model has on larger society. Namely, our districting system has distorting effects on real estate prices and economic segregation. If you’re against sprawl, school choice can mitigate that.
Under the current model, one of the first questions people with kids ask about living in a particular part of town is how good the schools are. With good schools, demand rises. With bad schools, demand falls. There is no way for this not to have a significant effect on how much homes in a particular area cost.
I went to a five-star high school. I wasn’t actually in a remarkably nice neighborhood, and also feeding into to my middle school was a larger community of blue collar types and fishing families. There were constant efforts to get my middle school removed from the mix. A few years ago, they succeeded. Now, kids from my neighborhood and the fishing neighborhood now go to school with a lot of other families that make their living on the sea. The end result is that instead of a five-star school, they have a four-star school (still lots of suburbanites). It’s apparently already having a deleterious effect on real estate prices.
It might be preferable that families across the economic spectrum live together and have their children go to school together, but it’s not realistic. Even if they stick around, their kids are likely going to private school. If they can’t afford private school, they’ll go somewhere that they’re comfortable sending their kids to the local public school. Hence, sprawl. Hence, exponentially higher neighborhood-exclusivity requirements. You don’t just build the houses bigger and get better asking prices because people want bigger and more expensive houses, you do so in order to keep out the children of fishermen and, if you can, auto mechanics.
So if we want to curb the economic divide, one way of doing that is to separate school from housing. School choice is something that might help. Or, I should say, absent school choice then economic segregation becomes much harder. Busing is pretty much the only other option, and that’s politically quite difficult.
In some places, such as where I grew up, districts are drawn by relatively arbitrary lines outside of city and/or county limits. This sort of thing does exacerbate the problem, but only to a degree. Both the old and new high school of my old stomping ground were in the same district (arguably, it’s only because it was in the same district as the five-star that the four-star looked so bad). Beyond that, the Big City district has schools that run across the spectrum. The schools that cater to the well-to-do actually get less money than the others (they need it less) but knock the socks off them. And so, if you want to live in a place that’s going to send you to one of those schools, housing prices skyrocket. It’s possible that it distorts it even further because you want to live in the middle of that school’s jurisdiction, lest you get carted off the same way my old neighborhood did.
Anyhow, regardless of what we think of school choice in the overall, this is very pertinent to the discussion at hand. To the extent that we want to argue the problem is with suffering communities that are poor and isolated, the current model arguably exacerbates that isolation. A school system that is less dependent on geography and housing would, among other things, make it harder and less desirable for the well-to-do to isolate themselves for their kids’ sakes. They’d more likely be in the same lottery as everyone else.
Incidentally, the places I have lived out west had an ageographic system of schooling. There were vouchers and charters, but mostly they didn’t pick your high school by where you lived. They had a lottery. I’m not going to say that there wasn’t neighborhood segregation, but there was less of it. You couldn’t guarantee your kid went to X-school by living in X-neighborhood. Where I live now this is mostly the case due to the fact that the town has only one set of schools, but that wasn’t the case where I lived in Deseret. Everyone wanted into High School X. All you could really do was cross your fingers, though. High School X probably wasn’t as well-performing as it could have been if they could have gotten their students based on living in the right neighborhood, but High School Z actually wasn’t that bad, cause it had good kids from the right neighborhood going to it.
You don’t have to have vouchers or charters to institute such a system, of course. That last part is mostly in reference to their being advantages to not having the neighborhood schools of which we are so fond.
So the presecription is busing? That’s a tough choice. On one hand, it works. Kids from lower income situations get better educations and kids from higher incomes suffer no ill effects. On the other hand you get less parental involvement, kids are subjected to long bus rides, increased expense for school districts, kids have longer days, etc.
The prescription would be “less poverty and crime”. In the end, the problem is public schools are expected to somehow solve problems of poverty and crime through better teaching methods.
Bluntly put — those kids have really, really crappy lives that get in the way of education. Their parents tend to have similarly crappy lives, which gets in the way of them supporting that education.
Focusing on the schools — charters, magnets, private schools, whatever — is mistaking the symptoms for the cause.
To quote Mike Schilling, “If you want to ensure that nothing gets done, make improving education dependent on solving the entire problem of inequality.”
Even if schools are only 20% of the equation, though, it’s the 20% we have the most control over. I am less confident in what influence we can exert over family life, or what cash transfers in and of themselves would do.
And yet public education is ‘failing’ because, well, the school districts full of poverty stricken, crime stricken kids perform…poorly. The rest? They do just fine — right up there with the rest of the world.
The solution is apparently to…get rid of the public school system?
I can’t get from A to Z. The ‘failing’ schools are the ones full of poor kids, kids with shattered lives, absent (or overworked) parents, where frankly it’s amazing they actually make it to school each day because ‘real life’ is such a factor. A few — a tiny few — have parents who can push past all that crap and want something better.
And hey, take those precious few kids and place them with kids whose lives aren’t crap, and they do quite well. Especially compared to the kids left behind.
But private schools, charter schools, vouchers — that 80, 90, 99% or whatever ‘left behind’ stays behind.
We’re just dancing around a simple fact: No method of education will fix the crappy home lives this kids have. The best we’ve ever done is remove the few that can benefit — and it works the same whether it’s a public magnet school, a charter school, or whatever.
And STILL the 90% or whatever are left behind!
So why do we claim public school is failing? (Most — the vast majority — do quite well!) Why are we turning to private schools or vouchers or charters when, really, it doesn’t make a difference? It’s just seperating out the few whose personal lives and parents have it together enough to make a difference.
private, public, charter, magnet — doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Because the school isn’t the problem.
So why are we talking school reform? It’s just cherry picking kids from poverty. What’s that got to do with 90% of American schools?
It’s interesting how, after years and years of being lectured on The Importance of Schools, when the twists and turns of what to do about them lead us to reforms that are less than popular with some, suddenly schools themselves don’t matter. Instead of The Importance of Schools, we have Well What Do You Expect.
I’m not sure you really want to convince me of the comparative lack of importance of schools. Even if you did, I would support school choice for – among other things – the reasons actually outlined in this post.
It would allow people to live where they want to live, instead of such a premium being based on which schools where you live are attached to. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the aggregate, but there are schools in Redstone I’ve subbed at where I would really rather prefer not to send my kids and others where I would happily. Fortunately, if we relocated there I would have more choice in school without being anchored to a particular school (and as it happens, I like the part of town better that has the sub-standard schools). It would allow parents who wouldn’t have our choice of where to live the same. There is good in that, even if it doesn’t lead to an aggregate improvement.
Black Hat Trumwill would likely oppose any school choice. I can get mine. I can move to the right part of Redstone (even if it isn’t my preferred part) and send my kids to a school I’m comfortable with. Increased school choice might actually make that more difficult for me, since I wouldn’t be able to buy my kids into the right public school. Black Hat Trumwill, who doesn’t think any of this matters, isn’t actually your friend, though. He wants to know why we’re spending so much on schools that can’t do much good.
White Hat Trumwill only exists because he was once convinced of the importance of schools.
I think you’re forcing a meaning into my words that isn’t there.
Let me break this down simply for you: For the bulk of Americans, the public school system does quite well. (This is born out by international comparisons). There are things to fix, and anything can be improved, and I’d never call it perfect — or close to it. But it works fine.
There are some that have horrible, horrible outcomes. A few can be understood as flat-out mismanagement, stupidity, what-have-you. There are so many schools in America that that’s inevietable.
But let’s face it, the “failing” American school — the ones with the horrible, year after year, administration after administration, results — they all look really alike. From state to state, despite different curriclums, school boards, state standards — those failing schools all tend to be very alike.
The students are poor — very poor. Generally urban, sometimes rural. Their parents are absent or overworked. Even if their parents value education, they lack the time to help or be involved. Food is often scarce. There’s a lot of drug use, often times gangs and violence.
Kids are not formless widgets, not raw materials entering into a factory. They’re human beings with lives outside of school, with problems and context that have NOTHING to do with the classroom yet impact their education far more than any teacher, good or bad.
These schools suck because, bluntly, the kids that go there have incredibly crappy lives that make getting a real education close to impossible, because their crappy lives don’t change when they go to class, they’re surrounded by kids with equally crappy lives, and frankly everything in their life is crap coated crap with crap filling.
You could take the best freakin school in the US and plop it down in their district, and those kids wouldn’t do any better, because the school isn’t the problem. The problem is their lives OUTSIDE of school.
Which brings up busing, because if you bus too many of these kids with the crap lives they form little crap nuggets that just reinforce themselves.
The ones that vouchers, charters, magnets, or busing helps? They’re the lucky freaking few, whose parents can stem the tide of the crap and get them someplace away from all the miserable kids with the crap lives, and the violence, and drug use, and poor role models, and absolute lack of parental involvement.
That’s the freakin’ truth of the school system, public or private. The crappiest teachers and curriculm in the US will do passably well with the sons and daughters of the middle class, and the best in the US will fail miserably when presented with the children of an urban hell.
And when you talk about “Failing schools” — it’s the urban hell you have to fix, because no amount of miracle teachers is gonna do more than save a few edge cases.
All vouchers do — all charters do — is cherry pick those edge cases. Sure it looks good. Because you’ve tossed all the problem kids out.
So in short: School IS important.
But neither schools nor teachers are magical unicorns that shoot our rainbows that turn a school full of poverty-stricken kids whose parents are focused on getting enough food for the kids, and where the kids themselves lead lives surrounded by drugs, violence, rampant poverty, and such into excellent students.
Charter schools lack this magic too. Which is the point. People want to “fix schools” to fix this problem. It ain’t going to happen. There’s no magic school system that will fix these kids.
Their problems aren’t education related. Their problems INTERFERE with education. No amount of tinkering with the schools is going to change that.
What I don’t really understand is why the futility you present is supposed to change my mind. I haven’t argued unicorns and rainbows. I’ve actually argued housing and schooling. Maybe it will lead to some improvement on the margins, maybe it won’t. I’d still like to see it tried. And if it doesn’t lead to improvement? We still have housing-schooling and some opportunity given to engaged parents who happen to live in the wrong part of town.
You can swear up and down that the school doesn’t make a difference, at least for them. Given that I believe that schools make a difference for my future kids, I am hard pressed to pronounce that it amounts to shuffling deck-chairs in their case. Maybe every last one of their problems are insurmountable, or maybe we can find a way to improve things for them even if not fixing them.
The futility, though, doesn’t affect my view on vouchers so much as it makes my support for funding drop precipitously. Why bother?
Apropos my comment below:
You can swear up and down that the school doesn’t make a difference, at least for them. Given that I believe that schools make a difference for my future kids, I am hard pressed to pronounce that it amounts to shuffling deck-chairs in their case.
Individual schools make a difference, but that difference doesn’t consistently break along private/public lines. Your kids may very well fare better in this school vs. that one, but the reason that a particular school may be better than another is more complex that it appears at first. A lot of what makes a five-star school a five-star school is the presence of five-star students. If you bus in a bunch of 1 or 2 star students suddenly your five-star school is a four-star or three star.
Complaining that those who insist on the view that fixing inequality is the only way to fix education are being fatalistic is only true if you buy into the notion that inequality per se is intractable. That’s a convenient position to hold for folks near the top, isn’t it?
To me, the devil is in the details as far as busing goes. Above a certain quotient, unruly kids can take over a classroom atmosphere, and kids from this SES category are more likely to be unruly than kids from that SES category. An aggressive busing system, like aggressive charter schooling, could have the desired effects vis-a-vis housing and economic segregation, or it could make matters worse (for example, if the well-to-do schools in Big City School District were to be integrated proportionally, the parents there would put their kids in private school or, more likely, move out of the reach of whatever geographic base we’re talking about).
Of course, lower SES kids have to be educated somewhere. The trick is finding something that those outside those categories can live with. So it depends on what kind of busing we’re talking about.
Louisville’s system is lottery based. Schools are placed in clusters with roughly 2/3 being affluent and 1/3 being poor. Kids can be bused within their cluster. We only do at the elementary school level though.
You will also have to take on the NEA and their union stranglehold on education, so good luck.
You are aware that each state has a pretty much completely independent school system, and thus the “NEA’s strangehold” ranges from “strict” to “laughably non-existant”.
Texas, where the Teacher’s Unions are so weak as to be a laughable joke, is surprisingly not top in the nation in education.
That doesn’t matter. Teacher’s unions are so pervasively evil that their mere presence in a state half a continent away is enough to ruin the school system in a fine, upstanding, god-fearin’ state such as Texas.
You’re committing the cardinal sin of thinking that facts actually matter.
Morat:
“Texas, where the Teacher’s Unions are so weak as to be a laughable joke, is surprisingly not top in the nation in education.”
So you would have us believe that you have to have a strong teachers union to have an excellent school system? That is a good laugh.
Will,
What Morat is saying is true. Unfortunately I can’t provide a link simply because I can’t figure out the right search terms for Google (and the downloaded copy is on the hd of a busted laptop), but the Bush Administration Dept. of Education released a report–this would have been about ten years ago–comparing student achievement between public, private, and parochial schools.
The researchers looked at individual student outcomes controlling for both the socioeconomic of the students themselves and the aggregate s/e makeup of the student body as a whole at each school studied. So it wasn’t just comparing public vs. private but public rich vs. public poor vs. private rich vs. private poor, etc. And I stress that this was the Bush administration ED, so it’s hard to make the case they were biased toward public education.
The findings were… basically no statistical difference in student outcomes between public, private, charter, and parochial. The only difference that stood out was a lower achievement level in math/science for students in evangelical parochial schools. Not a huge surprise when you think about it.
Now if you want to argue that school choice is a good thing in and of itself on basic libertarianish grounds, fine. I wouldn’t be inclined to argue. If you’re arguing that school choice via busing would reduce geographic sorting along income levels… I’m not so sure. Isn’t that more a function of housing costs/preferences in general; size of the house, ocean/mountain view, etc.? I guess I can see it reducing the effect of that one particular factor on the cost of housing in a particular neighborhood. But only on the margins; it’s still going to be nicer/more convenient to live near that nice school than have your kids ride a bus for an hour each way. And the politics! Oy!
Finally, noting that there is little if any difference between public, private, charter, and parochial in outcomes is not the same thing as saying that funding doesn’t matter. Cons like to say you can’t fix this by throwing money at it. Perhaps not, but you don’t fix it by starving it either. Plush carpeting in the classroom, marble fixtures in the bathrooms, and granite colonnades out front do nothing to enhance the education, true. But worn-out, tattered textbooks, forcing teachers to pay for school supplies from their own pockets, classrooms that are hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and generally crumbling infrastructure surely can’t enhance outcomes either. One thing that’s overlooked is that urban schools are going to be more expensive to run simply because everything is more expensive in urban settings. Of course you have to pay those teachers more than teachers in rural areas; it’s a lot more expensive to live in urban areas. I know, I’ve lived in both.
Rod,
My reasons for supporting school choice are three-fold (in no particular order):
1. I like experimentation. One of the better ways to spur this is with opt-in programs. I am much more skittish about experimentation at assigned ones. I’d like experimentation to lead to better results, though I would also take it leading to the same results for less money.
2. I don’t like telling people that they simply have no choice but to attend their local school and saying “oh, trust me, it makes no difference.” Statistics aside, I’m not going to send my kids to lousy schools on that reassurance.
3. The housing-schooling issue. For many, it won’t make any difference. School choice won’t convince people to take on neighbors they are highly averse to. For my own part, though, the schools are one of the big deal-breakers. When I think about how awesome it was to live in a particular place despite its… downsides… I also think that I couldn’t live there with kids in large part because of the schooling. Put in just enough people like me (even if we’re a distinct minority), though, and the social situation becomes less severe. Take away the schools issue, and I’m genuinely open to it. I don’t think I am alone in this.
Regarding school funding, our schools are far from being starved. Fund misallocation? Sure. Our schools are, for the most part, doing fine. They were also doing fine thirty years ago, when we were paying a lot less. I’m not opposed to how much we’re paying now. A lot of it is going to special ed, for instance, and my exposure to special ed instruction has lead me to be rather sympathetic to that. It’s a serious and not just rhetorical agitation with me, however, that after years of talking about how important schools are and we need to ramp up spending, with comparatively limited results to show for it, now that there are some potentially unwelcome changes that it’s not the schools after all.
My views on the futility of fixing poverty or fixing inequality don’t emanate from my lofty perch. They come from the years I spent living on the wrong side of town. It was an enlightening experience, and not one that lead me entirely to the right. I determined that no, we can’t fix things by telling them to get a job and Live Right. I also gained a skepticism towards solutions of the more liberal sort. I’m not opposed to trying this and that and seeing how we can make a difference on the margins. I am opposed to making it a precondition of or firewall to school reform.
One more thing I forgot to mention: I do not have the libertarian aversion to government-run schools. I am the product of public schools and proud of it. Not just the five-star high school, but also the three-star middle school, and a university that some people look down upon. On the college front in particular, I am rabidly in favor. On K-12, I fully intend to send my kid to a school that operates under a government’s auspices.
Out of curiosity:
What factors are you using for your Michelin stars? What separates a five star HS from a four star one? Why was your middle school a mere three stars?
The state had a ranking system(not stars, but five tiers), once upon a time (maybe they still do). I’m spit-balling it for the new school (basically, assigning it the same value as the other school that side of the river). It was based on test scores.
The middle school has since become a magnet school, so it would actually probably rank better today. I would guess its rating had more to do with inputs (the students going there) than outputs (what we got from going there). A number of classes would get hijacked by misbehaving students*, though, so they mighta had an effect on marginal students. That’s about it. I have no complaints about the education, just the unruliness of the place.
* – One class got a rookie teacher to walk out after three months. He was replaced my a former marine who I suspect took the job precisely because of what it was.
Will,
. I like experimentation. One of the better ways to spur this is with opt-in programs. I am much more skittish about experimentation at assigned ones. I’d like experimentation to lead to better results, though I would also take it leading to the same results for less money.
I like experimentation, too. In the other discussion TVD pointed out that: We have 50 states, 55 million K-12ers, 7 million teachers, 100,000 public schools, 33,000 private schools, [and] 5,000 charter schools. That sounds like a lot of room for experimentation right there. And the experiment has been running for many decades (though not as long for charters).
And if you mean real scientific experimentation, the kind that produces actual answers to questions, then “opt-in” is exactly wrong and “assigned” is exactly the right approach. You have to be able to control for confounding variables like self-selection. I have no doubt your kids will do great, because you seem like the kind of person that would be a great Dad. We had a rule with our daughters; absolute minimum was two story books every night starting with the baby picture board-books. And anytime the kid would try to climb on my lap with a book it was story time, even if I was busy. It was job #1. And you know what happened? Way above grade level on reading, which makes learning everything else so much easier.
I don’t like telling people that they simply have no choice but to attend their local school and saying “oh, trust me, it makes no difference.” Statistics aside, I’m not going to send my kids to lousy schools on that reassurance.
Well, maybe we’re just lucky, but we live in a small (~4500 pop.) town in Western KS. And we have exactly one elementary and one high school in town. No private, charter, or parochial schools. No Choice. And our schools are pretty darned good; well above 90% graduation rate (97% IIRC), high percentage goes on to college, very little violence. I’m sure part of it is just that our community doesn’t have the stratification you would get in larger places. But I have to wonder as well whether the lack of choice is actually a good thing here. Maybe since the wealthier parents are just as “stuck” as the poorer ones everybody finds themselves caring a lot more about the quality of that one choice that isn’t a choice. Maybe… just a theory.
Regarding school funding, our schools are far from being starved. Fund misallocation? Sure. Our schools are, for the most part, doing fine. They were also doing fine thirty years ago, when we were paying a lot less.
Perhaps you’ve seen some of my graphs I gleaned from DOL CPI statistics. The cost of education has been rising at about 2-1/2 times the rate of general inflation since the mid 70’s. But there’s nothing particularly unique about that. Right along with medical services. And legal services. And financial services. And veterinarian services. And those differentials from the general rate of inflation are remarkably steady and consistent; practically straight lines. And they all started in the mid-70’s after Nixon abandoned the Bretton-Woods accords. That’s also when we started running continuous trade deficits. I know this sounds like some internet economic crankery, and “standard economic theory”, i.e. Chicago School ideology, holds that none of that could possibly matter. But if you actually look at the data it’s clear as this Texas blue sky I’m staring at.
Only if you don’t mind using the kids as guinea pigs against their parents’ consent. Yeah, yeah, school boards. Insufficient. I don’t want to try out my favored ideas with unwilling parents. Not until they’ve been tested with the willing, with optimistic results. Maybe not even then.
Only if you’re looking for a policy to implement uniformly. If you are, my preference is opt-in then district then state. But broadly, I’m looking for a program that will produce good results with willing families here and then trying them with willing families there. I am skeptical of uniform methodology.
We have a similar case here, though we have school choice within the county. The county has two high schools, sixty miles apart. There was an interesting case some years back where some of the parents in the community drove their kids 40 miles to a K-8 school because of some dissatisfaction with the local school. Whatever was wrong was made right again, or they got tired of it, and I don’t think anyone does that anymore.
The schools here are good (the 40-mile trek notwithstanding) and we’d have no trouble sending our kids there. With other communities, though, we’d either want a charter option or we would pick another way to live. I agree that charter schools and school choice more generally are limited in more rural areas.
Yeah, but public education isn’t an industry, as such. There was a very public push to start spending more on public schools because they were considered to be so important and so under-funded. In this case, it was policy rather than random economic events.
(Not that I don’t find the correlation you refer to interesting.)
Yeah, but public education isn’t an industry, as such. There was a very public push to start spending more on public schools because they were considered to be so important and so under-funded. In this case, it was policy rather than random economic events.
(Not that I don’t find the correlation you refer to interesting.)
Well, since funding for K-12 is all over the map, depending on the state you live in and such, it’s inevitable that some schools are underfunded, but not all by any means. Ours seems OK, too. But, again, that may be at least partly due to the enforced buy-in by all constituents since we have no other choices. I’m mostly pushing back against the libertarianish meme (which I acknowledge you’re not flogging here) that education costs are rising so much faster than inflation because of government waste and inefficiency. Check out this graph: US Inflation Rate for College Tuition And Fees, Elementary And High School Tuition And Fees and All Items
Notice how cost inflation for K-12 and college are practically identical? And that is despite drastically different funding formulas and the competition you get between colleges that is largely absent in K-12. If any of the arguments from the right/libber wing were valid, you would expect to see some divergence, wouldn’t you? I don’t have a well-developed hypothesis yet that explains all the date I’m looking at, but sure as hell none of the standard explanations do either.
I remember my Con Law professor telling us (we were discussing various school cases) that the best way to improve schooling is through socio-economic diversity and getting rid of stuff like AP/Honors programs that take away the really smart kids and put them in a separate universe. This works because the really involved parents tend to stay really involved and demand that teachers work at an acceptable level and this raises all the boats.
Unfortunately as others mentioned above, this means lots of tricky transportation issues because of economic segregation and we all know how well busing went in the 1970s. Maybe you can do internet learning but that seems short to, the poor kids would get to hear a teacher in a good school district but not get to interact.
I will point out that not all wealthy areas have good school districts though. Many do but it depends on the kind of area, the socio-cultural politics of the parents, and other issues. My experience growing up in well-to-do suburban New York is that there are suburbs where parents move to for good schools and suburbs that are equally well-to-do but everyone sends their kids to private school and school budgets get voted down constantly. Affluent suburbs in more red, state areas tend to have more private schooling.
When you get to cities themselves, it tends to be more mixed because large urban school districts are very unwieldy beasts. Some of the worst high schools in Manhattan are located in wealthy areas. Brooklyn seems to be a bit different because of the unseemingly never-ending wave of gentrification. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are now filled with upper-middle class professionals who were priced out of Manhattan but could not quite bring themselves to move to the suburbs. These professionals are at least working hard to make some of the local elementary schools into excellent educational institutions. I have no idea what happens at the Middle School level. At the high school level, the system is too unwieldy for parents to get involved with in a hands on way. Either their kids get into the handful of good public high schools or they attend private school.
If you think the subject of school choice makes me uncharacteristically excitable, you should get me talking about the anti-tracking folks. Obviously, my sense of egalitarianism has its limits.
That’s not my experience at all.
The issue with a country as large as the United States is that we are big enough to produce enough data for every talking point
😉
Your Con Law professor was wrong. I’m trying to remember the technical term for that — mainstreaming maybe?
But yeah, it was tried. Taking the smart kids, the average kids, and the — shall we say — challenged kids (whether due to motivation or inherent issues) and shoving them all together. Surely the smart kids would help the average kids and the involved parents would demand more, and the low-performing kids could see what they could do with more work and….
And it didn’t work that way.
The smart kids got bored and tuned out, if they didn’t outright misbehave. The average kids got neglected as teachers focused on the struggling kids. The struggling kids got upset that they were constantly under the teacher’s eye and no one else had to work like they did — they saw the other kids “lazing around” and “not working” and getting better grades.
It was a freaking disaster for everyone involved.
Which made it example #497,431 one the list of “Why we don’t take someone’s bright education idea and implement it everywhere at once”. (Most famous was “New Math”. I’ve never bothered to determine if it wasn’t known, at the time, that kids cognitatively couldn’t hack it, or whether they learned that since….).
Open-plan classrooms, mainstreaming kids, New Math — there’s a ton of ideas that work in the right times, at the right places, with the right kids. But people insist on running education like a business – -heck, like a factory — and thinking there’s some magic algorithm or process that will stamp out good students from raw material.
All of which neglects the fact that kids aren’t raw material, they enter the classroom with individual flaws and damage (as well as promise and potential), and they have lives and experiences OUTSIDE the classroom as well.
If you think you know the KEY to better education? You’re flat out wrong. And probably on a school board, making it happen anyways.
getting rid of stuff like AP/Honors programs that take away the really smart kids and put them in a separate universe.
“And instead of having varsity, JV, and intramural football teams, throw fast, slow, big, small, agile, clumsy, football-savvy, and sports-hating kids together at random, so they’ll learn teamwork and all succeed together. What? No school in the world does that, because it’s insane? The talented kids will either quit the team or make the untalented kids’ lives hell until they quit? And meanwhile, the parents of the talented kids will be up in arms, furious that their kids have to be dragged down by the ‘losers’? Imagine that.”
I think Morat is right. Poverty trumps everything and you can’t fix that in a capitalist system. There will always be differences due to race, family history & cultural heritage, luck, etc. In Florida, we rate our schools (A,B,C,D,F) based on 2 main factors: (1) statewide standardized tests and (2) percent of kids in each school that are on free lunch & other poverty programs. If we didn’t use this fudge factor, the differences between the schools in the poor and the middle income neighborhoods would be so striking that our politicians and school administrators would would be hit with explosive charges of racism. So they play the shell game of pretending to care deeply about school achievement while avoiding the real issue of poverty in a society that prizes economic competition and the resulting diversity of economic and social class.
To go back to Mike Schilling, “If you want to ensure that nothing gets done, make improving education dependent on solving the entire problem of inequality.”
I’m not saying that poverty and inequality aren’t important. I am more skeptical of our ability to “fix” it in order to fix education. I think taking the discussion in that direction is to take it down a rabbit hole.
We are already down the rabbit hole– it’s just that some of us won’t acknowledge it! Investing our money and hopes into Headstart-type programs, charter schools, early intervention, etc., buys time for politicians, school administrators, and other parties who want to hold on to their jobs. None of them will honestly address the inevitable inequalities that come with competition and human variety. I’m sure that putting more effort into how we do education can make some small improvements– but they won’t be lasting and significant.