> And the plagiarism detection software was indeed fooled! What the student didn’t realize is that teachers don’t need software to be able to tell the difference between honestly composed sentences and computer-generated gibberish.
This is sad. It reads more as though teachers and school employees are doing whatever they can to keep/justify their jobs, but not to improve learning. It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. If students can’t pass the test, then the test must be made easier, that way more students can pass and the teacher doesn’t look bad.
That's an incentive alignment problem. It is the responsibility of management (state and district admin) to ensure that what is best for the teacher's career is also what is best for student education.
Who's responsibility is it to ensure that what is best for the management (state and district admin) is also what is best for student education?
I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.
Parents who have money and care enough already pick the schools by simply buying a house in a slightly different place. Cupertino used to be the hot place for tiger parents in the bay area to go but I'm not sure if it still is. The issue is that then the rest of the schools get even worse which eventually results in bad social issues in 20 years. The kids from those schools grow up and everyone has to deal with them.
"School-choice" is great for optimizing local maximums at the expense of just about everyone else. Public education should focus on the lowest common denominators to maximize education per tax dollar. It's not the smart people with lack of opportunity that drag down society, it's the massive amount of undereducated adults that become dangerously suceptable to manipulation.
That may be true—the system may be better served by raising the floor on education. But voters are individuals, and the most passionate are likely the type of people who prioritize maximizing their own (smart) kids’ opportunities over raising the floor for everyone.
If you want to maximize education per tax dollar then you need to separate out the smart kids into their own schools. Benefits of education are not evenly distributed. It is heavily weighted towards the right tail.
Pretending that the outcome for everyone should be college and a degree is part of the problem - admitting that outcomes may be different allows you to create different paths adjusted for abilities (think trade school instead of high school, etc). Forcing everyone into the same mold results in a broken mold.
Not clear what your argument against school choice is.
Not sure what you mean by “optimizing local maximums at the expense of everything else”. It almost sounds like an argument but there’s no substance.
You claim that public education should focus on the lowest common denominator so we can avoid an underclass susceptible to manipulation. That’s both a weak justification to purposely damage public education and condescension shown by elites when poor people don’t vote the way “they should”.
School vouchers aren't really about aligning incentives. They're a backdoor to having the public fund the religious schools comprising a large majority of private schools.
It’s probably a bit more complicated than that… if failure rates went way up because of COVID, it would probably be an honest representation of how little students learned, but it would also screw over a lot of kids and affect their futures. It’s not really their fault that society didn’t adapt well.
I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.
I would say most teachers pass students so hell doesn't rain down upon them in the form of administrators, parents, and the school district/city itself.
I think this is the defining distinction - if the child is disciplined or fails, who do the parents blame? If they blame the teacher or the system, you’re going to get bad outcomes on average as you’re removing the tools the teachers need.
> Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period— it’s so early, you know!— and during fourth period
I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.
I'm a bit surprised that the Bay Area, one of the wealthiest places in the world, has problems with public schools too. "Public schooling is child abuse" gains more steam every day.
California can't fund any of its public schools properly because of Prop 13. None of the wealthy homeowners care about this, because they're all too old to have kids in school.
Don't ask me, I was responding to "one of the wealthiest places in the world". Though I think schools with rich enough families attending do have attached foundations and just ask for charitable donations.
The easiest way to live in the area as a schoolteacher is to marry an engineer or someone else with a home, too.
you are utterly wrong here -- public school have gotten, do get, and will get, massive boatloads of money in most urban areas of California. There are many layers of money-consumers in each school system, especially in the Bay Area.
It's not clear to me how SF, the richest city in the country with the lowest percentage of children, and that charges an income tax on residents, doesn't have hands down the best public schools in the country.
They certainly have money, but money doesn't seem to be the problem here. None of the things that the article talks about have any obvious connection with school funding, but with the culture of the school and how it's run. If the school's budget doubled tomorrow, for example, they still wouldn't be able to give a grade less than 50% because they would still have a policy forbidding it.
(I went to a tiny rural elementary school located between a tractor supply store and a goat pen. Three teachers taught six grades, two grades per classroom. Compared to the SF schools, it was incredibly under-resourced -- and yet it was a Good School, academically much higher-performing. I think about this sometimes when people point at money as obviously the reason why Johnny can't read.)
Prop 13 protects people who got in early. Median house prices in SF have been over a million for close to a decade. I'd think they have plenty enough suckers by now paying five-figures in property taxes.
The problem more applies to poorer places like EPA than SF. AFAIK the main problem with SF public schools is nobody wants to use them because they'll assign you to one across the city.
> American Renaissance (AR or AmRen) is a white supremacist website and former monthly magazine publication founded and edited by Jared Taylor.
> The publication promotes pseudoscientific notions "that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies."
The question one might ask is, "did the author write this because they're racist, or are they just sharing their experience and no one else would dare publish it?"
Given there are multiple ways of verifying the details, I'd go with "just sharing their experience".
Let's say that there are two races, orange and blue. Alice is orange and goes to a majority-blue church and gets mistreated because of her race. Bob is blue and goes to a majority-orange church and gets mistreated because of his race.
Alice and Bob are both upset about their experiences. They submit articles to "The American Truth," an orange-supremacist newspaper whose stated mission is to convince orange people that they'll never be happy in a society where blue people are treated as equals. Naturally, they publish Alice's article and not Bob's.
Carol is orange and goes to a different majority-blue church and things are totally fine; Dan is blue and goes to a different majority-orange church and things are also totally fine. Eve, who is orange, and Mallory, who is blue, both go to the same church which has a good mix of folks from the two races, and they love it. "The American Truth" is of course totally uninterested in hearing any of these stories.
If you read "The American Truth," you'll think that there's a problem with blue people being intolerant, and you won't be aware of problems with orange people being intolerant, nor will you be aware that, quite possibly, these are both exceptional cases and most orange people and blue people alike are quite tolerant and welcoming and they tend to get along with each other.
I like your explanation, but it seems you're arguing in favor of reading "The American Truth", since it will give you both perspectives if you're currently only reading blue-supremacist newspapers?
And you'll be fine as long as you recognize the biases on both sides and verify claims.
Not really, because the blue-supremacist newspapers won't publish any of the other perspectives - they're also going to say that the blue man cannot survive in a society with orange people. You won't hear any of the stories where things are fine.
The problem with p-hacking is you need to honestly report the negative results too, not that you need to also find "statistically significant" results reporting the opposite effect.
But yes, if you consciously make an effort to find extremist sources from all possible points of view (and in the real world, that's rarely the same as "both points of view"), and if you make a point of reading them all critically and skeptically, then that is likely to get you a more balanced perspective about things on the margins. Can you find a story about life as a black teacher in a majority-white school published by a black supremacist/separatist organization?
You can know the enlightenment is over, when you read summaries like this. When we choose social proximity to (evil thing) over veracity of content, you can see how tribalism forms, in lieu of meritocracy.
The truth is probably racist. That's how the ship goes down.
This is a racist screed. The only information available about that author is that they write for the linked site, a well-known white supremacist publication.
Only 2 articles by the author, so I wouldn't strongly associate them with the site.
No information about author, and published on a site like that because such topics are forbidden, so I wouldn't say that's a good tool for judging the truthfulness/quality.
Have to look at the details and see if they align with what is verifiable.
Some of the claims can be verified by video footage that is widely available online. Many people will still dispute those claims.
Ignoring the obvious white supremacist dogwhistling completely littered throughout their article, they literally allude to the 14 Words at the end!
> But doing nothing means whites must condemn their own flesh and blood to the nightmare I’ve described — and we have a duty to protect the future for our children.
Wow, lot's to unravel in this one. First, the kids are trying to skip out on mindless work like book reports. Most of the students aren't bright enough to fool the teacher in the anecdotes, but probably there are some that do.
Next, there's the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents.
Finally, there's the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren't going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed.
We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren't met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.
I don’t particularly agree with GP’s comment, but homework is not the main way everyone learns. Maybe some individuals do learn that way, but others absolutely do not. I personally did not do a single homework assignment other than a senior term paper throughout all of high school and still learned the material presented. I think it’s too broad to just assert that homework == ‘way to learn’.
> With half the term remaining, teachers of seniors received a notification that they would not be allowed to fail students unless they filled out a form right then and there declaring that the student was certain to receive an F.
I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a "cover your ass" policy than lowering expectations for seniors.
The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those).
It seems that OP's school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint.
I would imagine that failing a class is more "high stakes" for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more "litigious" if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board/suing that having to repeat a school year.
The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher's consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn't be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting/lawsuit), notifying the student's family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn't be too much of a burden.
> This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint.
If this were the reason for the new forms, why would the school only have teachers fill out the form if the student were guaranteed to fail? I'd think the schools would go the opposite direction and make sure to notify all parents whose kids might fail.
I dug up SFUSD board policy [1] around failing notifications. The policy reads:
"Whenever it becomes evident to a teacher that a student is in danger of failing a course, the teacher shall arrange a conference with the student's parent/guardian or send the parent/guardian a written report. The refusal of the parent to attend the conference, or to respond to the written report, shall not preclude failing the pupil at the end of the grading period. (Education Code 49067)"
The policy clearly states that the student has to be "in danger of failing a course" and not "guaranteed to fail a course". But, if a teacher knows that they might fail a student, they must notify parents by some reasonable deadline (again, it seems that OP's school sets it by week 9 of the semester or by the mid-semester mark). Without this notification, they might not be able to fail a student because they weren't in compliance with the CA ed code and district policy. This becomes even more of an issue when HS graduation is concerned.
I don't know if the forms are new or not. The policy was last updated in 2017 so they are at least 4 years old. What what is worth, I filled out similar forms when I was a teacher 10 years ago in another part of CA, so I suspect that they have been around for longer than that (and the forms were mass produced on carbon paper slips that seemed printed in the 70s). I am also wondering if the word "guaranteed" came up in response to COVID-related changes to grading policies and the district having implemented a credit/no credit grading system.
The policy doesn't surprise me, but it does sadden me. Why should the failure be contingent on trying to have a meeting with the parents? I always get the feeling there's more paperwork in CA than any of the other states.
Im afraid it is widespread. My highschool in Alaska implemented a graduation competency exam around 2000. Less than half my class passed what I thought was an easy test. So... they made next years test easier to meet the desired pass target.
> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.
Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it.
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student.
What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning.
That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
If you define "teaching style" to mean things like being in the classroom, but that's not the usual definition. The usual definition is explaining things in different ways.
The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
> By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades.
So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental".
But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
Well, people are funding schools through taxes. Then they send their kid to school. Then the school decides their kid is too stupid* to do much, so they get relegated to dumb class and their future career prospects get nullified.
This is how it works in many countries where schools are segregated by learning ability.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
So rather than putting students that learn slowly into classes that move slowly, you keep them in normal classes where they drag along lost behind everyone else, and possibly drag the rest of the class down with them. I don't see how that is better for anyone involved, unless you think the credential is all that matters.
Because in practice concentrating the problem kids into one class tends not to help them. They get warehoused and fall further behind before being dumped onto society at 18.
So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity.
I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy.
The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
> The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
That's precisely why low achieving students are separated out. To give them extra help.
High achieving students are easy. Just point them and they go. This is why the second they started standardized testing and separating the students they were able to achieve results with high achievers. But their primary goal with these top-down programs was to actually help the slower students, that were graduating without being literature and whatever. Turns out it's just a really hard problem. It isn't that everyone in education somehow lacks the desire or common sense.
It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.
Or do you invest the most resources on the products, customers, and markets giving you the greatest return?
Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
Even for people who do have this goal ("helping those who need it most") in mind, this reasoning doesn't make any sense.
There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking.
The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
> Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
If you slow down the pace to help the "zero percenters" and only cover 80% of the material in the allotted time, the students who could have handled 100% of the material will be limited to 80%. And that slowdown still won't be enough to help the slowest learners much, so they'll still only learn, say, 20% of the material.
Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
Yes, that statement is the one that appears racist, because it is.
Try "it's almost as if being societally excluded for centuries is a predictor of social instability," which is both more accurate and descriptive of the problem we're trying to solve here.
> It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.
Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
I suppose you're saying that some people currently are wealthy enough to send their kids to private school, but choose not to (or don't have kids at all). These people wouldn't have a choice about paying the extra taxes that enable these better-funded comprehensive schools. This isn't a new problem, though, as childless people already pay taxes that are spent on existing comprehensive schools.
As for "decisions outside the comprehensive school system", I think that needs to be considered in the context of the government's existing regulation of private schools and the trend of academisation:
> Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
Except it isn’t similar.
Saying ‘taxing the rich more and put more money into public schools’ may be a good proposal but it is a completely different proposition from ‘take the resources from private schools and give them to public schools’.
The advantage of a private school is not the extra gym equipment or computer or any other resources, it is the social class that matter. If you don't pay for private school you will pay for location. There is no actual mixing, people just pay more to be around people similar to themselves and the cost of that will manifest in house prices instead of school prices.
I chuckled at "pupils from all backgrounds benefitting from each other". I grew up in a dirt poor family. Some of my classmates in high school were criminal material and many did end up in prison (for murder, not weed) before their 25th birthday. Some classmates were quiet folks with ADHD, some were punctual learners who really valued good marks. All sorts of backgrounds. The only "cross background" learning was bulling lessons that the future criminals were giving to the quiet folks. Teachers were useless and powerless to straighten up the bad apples. Luckily, I correctly guessed what I need to learn on my own to get "segregated away" from that madness, so my college years were decent. My takeaway from that experience was that the cross-background learning happens only when the backgrounds differ only slightly and have something in common.
I grew up poor and have ADHD, so went to state comp. I will say that there were definitely unpleasant sides to it, but I feel like my compadriates and I have a much more rounded and grounded view of society and class than the friends I know that went to private schools. You simply can't expect someone who's never felt poverty, whether it's their own or the people they see day in day out, to be able to be able to truly understand it.
I can see how it would probably be a more difficult experience for introverts.
Funnily enough, I got bullied more by the rich kids - who knew how to push my buttons and wind me up to the point I'd lash out and get in trouble - than the poor ones.
The system giving these rules is set up so the two are indistinguishable. Some people can't even tell the difference. Others can, but they keep quiet so their career isn't destroyed.
This looks like a classic "what gets measured gets managed".
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
I've never understood school either. Now that I'm 40 years old, I understand it less. I think there was a generation of adults who were 'in on the rhetoric' at one point. Telling people that these are places of education, instead of a kind of reformation facility, akin to jail.
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester.
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
+1 I saw this a lot with friends who were less interested in school and would quickly bail on a class once they missed a test or assignment and I couldn't really blame them.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
Caltech did it right. Professors were not allowed to grade based on attendance. If you could pass the final, you passed the class. If you could pass the final without even taking the class, you would get credit (although very, very few managed that feat!).
I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?
This is a good point, but it highlights the fact that classroom education is a compromise -- economic and social -- and not a moral standard. Thus I think we should at least be conscious of its limitations, even if we can't immediately do anything about them.
Sorry, I tried to be clear that that scenario is an unrealistic ideal. Ideal in the sense of a spherical frictionless student in a vacuum with infinite funding as well as ideal in the sense of good. In that case one solution would be more teachers than students.
Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone.
Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject.
I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind.
Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
I went to a tiny mixed age school and basically each kid worked on workbooks at their own pace.
The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck.
There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once.
We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it.
When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.
I guess in Montessori every single student isn't learning something different, but each one is often in a unique state of learning and development. The guide gives lessons in small groups, less than 6. Each kid gets a new lesson every few days and spends the remainder of their time "doing their work" (practicing their lessons and turning the results into the guide, doing small group research projects, etc.). The kid is encouraged to ask others for help understanding the lesson and to mentor others who are working on a lesson the kid knows. Once the guide observes the kid succeeding at the lesson, the kid is invited to the next lesson.
A great deal of research has gone into just this concept, often called "mastery-based learning." Sal Khan is one well-known proponent (look for the requisite TED talk).
> In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time
In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)
You could just study using your textbook and workbook. A lot of material relies on what you previously studied in some way. You should be able to learn the things that you missed with your experience and textbook.
Nowadays you also have the internet that can fill those gaps. If a student wants to learn, then there are many opportunities. But students usually don't want to.
That doesn’t get to the student incentive though. If you feel like you’re already going to fail, you may as well give up until next time. But if you’d progress continually, giving up makes less sense.
Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor. For example those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities. Or those who had an article published in the news…etc.
All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
> You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor
It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test.
> those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities
That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
> And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.
> The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests.
Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.)
Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic.
As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them is nonsense.
A lot has changed since then, college acceptance rates are plummeting and competition is absolutely cutthroat. I graduated ~10 years ago in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood and basically everyone took at least one SAT class, multiple practice test and many had coaches to help them with the entire admissions process.
Caltech's freshman class size is also about 50% larger than in my day. These days I also hear that people shotgun out applications (much easier to do with a computer rather than a typewriter!) which increases the rejection rate even with the exact same number of students.
I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.
I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.
I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.
One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.
I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."
I’m 18 now and took the SAT two years ago - I scored well without the need to practice too much, but official practice is available completely for free on Khan Academy. You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days, and anyone arguing elsewise is misguided as to how the test actually works.
And also - I agree - I never really learned “grammar rules” or the details of writing. I just learned from listening, talking, and reading many many books in elementary and middle school. To prepare for a test by memorizing vocab seems inherently the wrong approach.
> You really don’t need to pay anything to improve on the SAT these days
I heard something on This American Life, I think, about a "strong student" from a bad high school doing poorly on the SAT. I got the impression she hadn't prepared at all...which seems odd for a strong student when there are free resources.
> memorizing vocab
The College Board got called out for some of this after the "regatta" incident. It turns out rich kids were much more likely to know the term for a boat race. Oops.
I'm really curious to see the outcomes of the no-SAT cohort of college students, once the 2020-2021 year is ignored, data cleaned, etc. Even if GPA was enough in 2020, it seems like it would get harder and harder to compare schools over time without a standardized test.
Yup. I was taught to diagram sentences in school, but it seemed a useless skill, and I no longer recall any of it. I know if a sentence is grammatically correct or not just by reading it. There's no conscious thought process to it at all.
I read a great deal as a kid, too. Mostly scifi :-)
I made the mistake of attempting to learn German by memorizing. But who can remember which nouns go with der, die, or das? Not me. I bet the right way is to simply read the newspaper every day, looking up the words one doesn't know, one by one.
Times have changed a lot. Your advice might have applied as late as the mid 1990’s, but not much past the turn of the century.
In hindsight, boomers had a really easy time of it, even some we rightly revere for their contributions. Work hard, or be brilliant, or some combination of the two. That’s not enough today. Ken Thompson told the story somewhere of being literally chased down the east coast after graduation by Bell Labs recruiters. That would never happen now.
College Board worked with Khan Academy to put a free SAT prep course (with practice questions that it uses to figure out what you need to work on) together. Even if you don’t have internet at home, you could definitely get enough prep with an hour at a library or your lunch period a day. I boosted my score 100 points and only did 15-20 hours prior.
I think 15-20 hours of prep is reasonable, especially when it can be over months. I bet it would have taken more like 200 hours for another 100 points (which I why I don't think the test is as easily gamed as test detractors say).
The typical student aspiring to get into an elite college is aiming to get over 750 in reading and math. In my year getting one question wrong on math would reduce your score to 770.
Things are a bit less competitive on the subject tests. A couple questions wrong was still sufficient to get an 800 on Math level II my year.
In my view, we would do better with our educational resources and reform efforts to completely ignore the elite colleges and let them take care of themselves. I would much rather figure out how to support and strengthen the education system from the bottom up, starting with the community colleges, trade schools, and regional public universities.
> That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
Math competitions are nothing like the SAT. Not at all. You can grind your way to an 800 on the math SAT with a basic prep and an understanding of tenth-grade math; getting a perfect score on a math competition is something only a handful of people do each year. The hardest questions tend to be of the type "ok I am not even sure how to start this one" rather than "this one has a bunch of arithmetic and I'm not sure I have time to complete it".
> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.
> . The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from.
It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards):
D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard
C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard
B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard
A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard
(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.)
That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
Grades traditionally measure mastery of material on an externally imposed timeline under some amount of externally imposed pressure. I support moving to simply measuring master of material in most cases, but it's important to recognize that you lose some signal from those other areas. In real life, sometimes it's better to maximize for mastery regardless of timeline (within reason) while other times it's better to maximize for the best job you can do within a certain fixed amount of time.
You weigh the grading such that you could still pass the course by doing well in the end assessments. Something like hand out 30% of the grade during the course and the rest at the end.
> a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning
The same lesson is not being given over and over again.
There are X tests/assignments/projects for X areas covered.
Each is assessed in its turn.
Of course, there is usually some overall assessment on the content as a whole, at the end of a quarter/semester/year. I think that aligns perfectly with your desire.
If 50% is a passing grade, and a student neither mastered the topic at the beginning or the end, they would still pass. A better solution is to weight the assignments and exams at the end much higher, to give a students a chance to prove their knowledge, while still failing those who learned nothing.
If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different?
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
>I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.
Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Totally. My freshmen year of high school, I was in the gifted math class for Algebra II. I had actually taken Algebra II the year before in middle school but switched districts (ironically to try to have a more rigorous academic environment), using the same text book, and I received over a 100% in the class. In my high school class, homework was like 20% of the grade. Now, I was fourteen and going through a weird phase and sort of like, didn’t want to do my math homework. It was a waste of my time. It was pointless. I already knew the material. I was bored. The teacher knew this. She knew I knew the material and would frequently ask me to tutor other students. But I still had to do my homework, as pointless and devoid of meaning as it was. Because I was obstinate and going through a number of challenges with various medications for my ADHD and anxiety/depression, I pushed back. Because I couldn’t see why it mattered, especially when it was abundantly clear I had already mastered the material (and this was the gifted class — the honors or regular ed class would have had me doing Algebra I, which I took in sixth or seventh grade) and that homework was strictly performative.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
Bull... shit. We aren't even allowed to give students 0s anymore. 59 is the lowest we are allowed to give students which they literally play like a fiddle to their advantage. Schools, public and most charter, and the overall education system is so bad that it cannot be saved. Not only that but the complete default to cowardice of administrations not wanting to get sued by idiot parents, literally enables idiot parents to be worse idiots and get away with more and more things. EVERYTHING, is rigged against the teachers.
> I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
I think the 50% rule is okay. I get that it's annoying for the students who tried and got a 55%. But I suspect that the kids who would get score much less than a 50 are probably the least engaged and most disruptive.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. Idk if there's some arcane No Child Left Behind provision about kids who have been stuck for 3 years, but in general a 50% is a no go.
And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
> I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade.
You’re half right.
Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass.
That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year.
Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
> I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade.
You’d be wrong to assume that. Here’s a kid that made it to 12th grade having only ever passed 4 classes. 0.13 GPA, and that actually put him in the top 50% of his class. Things are much, much worse than you think.
The 50% rule is just changing the meaning of the numbers, no? 50% is the new 0%.
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism".
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I am baffled why they are doing a recall? According to the site, the main reason states because their kids have not gone back to school. To me, that's not a good enough reason for a recall (recalls cost money). Public schools are under state and county health guidance.
Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.
A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high.
Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.
> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.
> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.
SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
Something that is often overlooked in these conversations is the elementary schools should perhaps be considered completely differently from high schools. There were zero transmissions between students at my kids elementary school this whole year, despite the school opening as quickly as possible and despite several kids with asymptomatic COVID showing up at school and only being detected belatedly. I don’t think the same outcome would necessarily be expected at a high school.
This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.
> The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.
I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.
Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8
The San Francisco Board of Education have made many displays of incompetence and malice this past year which have been covered by both local and national media.
During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.
Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)
The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.
I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too.
I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19.
But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
At the point when he was confronted, had he already stolen the petitions. The fact that he gave them back doesn't turn that successful theft into a mere 'attempt'. It doesn't matter whether he was confronted a minute later or an hour later.
I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care; the problems of the article are virtually nonexistent at Lowell. I don’t think Lowell was particularly selective (I think something like 50% of applicants get in) and there were plenty of poor students (including myself) who benefited from an academic public school that does have both wealthy and non-wealthy students who care about learning (as opposed to private and suburban schools which definitely do discriminate on the basis of wealth/income).
> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
> Did you read the article? Yes, selective admissions filter out “bad” students including the type of students who don’t care about school who hold back students who do care
What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it?
> The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.
> Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them
Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism
No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
It’s an example for teens, not 10-year olds. If you can’t imagine an age-appropriate example for 10-year olds, allow me to suggest an alcoholic, drug addict, homeless, or abusive parent that gets in the way of a 10 year old studying and getting to school on time.
> Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
Ok, but you haven't answered my question
> No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
Children not being able to write a good essay when they are 10 because they have to work, is quite a degenerate case and I hope it is not the norm for those who are not admitted at this special school. The majority of 10-year-old kids, who aren't employed in violation of child labour laws, are smart enough to attend highschool without the need to make schoolwork easier.
> In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
This wokeness movement is not something I'm familiar with or affiliated to.
Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
I did indirectly. To be more explicit, I suspect the common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
> when they are 10 because they have to work
If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
> Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
> My indirect answer is not necessarily, although there may be some for whom the answer is yes. I suspect the more common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
So, the answer is: no, these kids are not broken.
> If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
You said kids can't write essay because they have to work. It sounds rather absurd to me.
> I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Fine, so we are excluding them because they are poor or disadvantaged, which was my initial point. And we are calling it "merit" because we ask them to write an essay.
It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
> It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
As we agreed that social economic background is a major predictor of admission, claiming that poor kids can’t benefit nor contribute to the experience of attending this school is a weirdly classist statement. It is also based on the assumption that to be able to read 3 novels in a year and to learn the cosine law, one must be a particularly gifted kid and not just a random 10, 13 or 16 year old.
Highschool prestige is a concept that I understand but I that I don't accept. Like I understand why some primitive tribes practiced human sacrifices, but I wouldn’t let them do such thing near me. So I’m not arguing for that. But if we accept that highschool prestige increases your chances in life, then state schools should distribute this privilege equally.
> Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
I insist that we should reason on why some minorities are significantly underrepresented. We may conclude that only gifted kids can attend this very important school and that kids from minorities are less likely to be gifted, but I wouldn’t be too sure of either.
If we find out that, say, blacks are significantly underrepresented because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, then the admission process is at least classist, knowingly or otherwise. We may also argue that it perpetuates class and racial differences.
Claiming that these kids have inherently different needs is like saying that my child should become an engineer because I’m well off, so he needs to learn advanced maths and whatever, and these children should serve food and clean toilets because they are poor, and they only need to learn who’s the boss. This is, like it or not, very very classist.
This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read.
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
>So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
Not having better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For some parents, their children are their greatest investment, and they won’t accept a lesser educational environment even if superior options aren’t available in some geographies.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
Good for those parents, but I don't think it's the job of society to optimize for the preferences of a small set of very involved parents. If anything we should optimize against them: bringing the gaps in school choice low enough that most parents won't prefer one over another anyway.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
The school still exists, it's just that it's being forced to change how students are selected for entry. The same debate is happening in NYC with Stuyvesant. No one is talking about getting rid of the high-prestige schools. Only who is in them.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
Many European countries have public high schools with admission tests that cover math, general knowledge and language. Some are more competitive than others.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
In Germany, when you finish primary school, your teachers give an advice on which school you can attend: Gymnasium, Realschule or Hamptschule, depending on how good they think you are.
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
> In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
As a graduate of the high school in question, I support the idea of selectivity everywhere, not just as a "magnet school" or "honors track".
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
If we do not take advantage of the more capable students because of equity, what will the future be without people who can do the sorts of things that require highly capable individuals?
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
GPA should be a result of mastering the material. Assuming that is roughly the case, if you ever go on to use any of the skills you were supposed to learn in school (math, computing, etc) you are asking if having learned those skills would help you perform those skills?
I doubt there will ever be a way to satisfactorily control for other variables when it comes to these sorts of real-life studies (there is a reason the majority of social science isn't reproducible[1])
I would lean more towards this is one of those truths that can be taken as self-evident. But, at the same time I would be skeptical that any published evidence would account for the infinitude of confounding factors.
My guess is it is similar to IQ results - does a good job weeding out people who know nothing, but does worse differentiating between students who are satisfactory and those who are exceptional
>GPA should be a result of mastering the material.
I know that personally my grades don't tend to correlate with my actual knowledge at all. I've failed things because I've been bored with them, and I've gotten perfect grades on things I don't understand at all outside the tested material.
Who cares? You're dealing with millions of school kids every year, and need aggregatable data to make important policy decisions about how education is done. As long as it correlates well, it's easy to collect, and can be trusted not to be manipulated for bad incentives like this article implies is happening, we use it.
> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.
> If we do not take advantage of the more capable students because of equity, what will the future of the country be without people who can do the sorts of things that require highly capable individuals?
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
> The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?
First, high school starts with 14 year olds, not 10.
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
Admission essays are a literary genre of their own, like the weird language used by some state bureaucracies. Knowing how to write these essays is a splinter skill.
Anyway, so you should not have been admitted but you succeeded anyway without being a gifted kid? It seems like you have proved my point.
Coming from a family of turkish Gastarbeiters, I am not surprised. You still have that problem in Germany, and I think it only got worse during the pandemic.
Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.
Maybe it didn’t get worse, but it still demonstrate what’s the result and maybe the objective of these strict selection criteria: that discriminated minorities end up being excluded. Let it be children with foreign origin in Germany (which doesn’t stop after a generation) or whatever minority is being excluded from this very important American school.
And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.
The CEO of BioNTech was told to attend a lower level school, which wouldn’t have allowed him to go to university. He claims that if it weren’t for a German neighbour he would not have gone to a gymnasium.
This is a form of discrimination.
> If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
I would love to see this evidence if you could link it, particularly regarding people of sub saharan african origin. I've been trying to kick my racism ever since I learnt about the measured IQ (and other intelectual achievement) average differences.
The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame.
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles
It raises the question, what are we getting for our money (in the US)?
> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries...
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Part of this is in having schools bearing the brunt of other failures in society or by having schools be the ones trying to solve those issues.
Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).
This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.
---
The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.
It does depend on what we mean by read and write. I don't mean just recognizing letters and being able to reproduce them. An adult should be able to read and understand an article from a decent newspaper (say the Financial Times), and write a 5 line summary. Definitely not all 12 year olds can to do that and, I'd argue, a large fraction of adults can't either.
Most people never retain much of anything past that anyway, in my experience. I’d guesstimate that fewer than 20% of undergraduate school graduates are actually well educated in any meaningful sense of the term.
I guess it depends what you classify as being able to read, write and use basic math operations because in my opinion a large majority of 13 year olds can't do these things well.
Most adults don't seem to be able to do these things well though, so I obviously have a skewed perspective.
The problem is that parents make a stink when their special little snowflake is given a bad grade, or sent to the principal, or whatever. But parents don't make a stink when their kid doesn't learn, because the teacher is too busy dancing around the kids that s/he can't do anything about because their parents would make a stink.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
In SF, the parents are absolutely not the cause here. The issue is a top-down mandate from the school board focus on equity to the detriment of all other objectives.
Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.
This sounds like something out of a surrealist novel.
> consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they're just going to pass students anyways, what's the point of increasing the funding?
I mean, my school where I went could only afford four days a week. We had so many budget cuts that the school decided the only way to go forward was to cut the fifth day. This lasted for years and I don’t know if they’ve ever returned to a normal schedule.
New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child.
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021-22 reflects the significant allocation of one-time federal funds in 2020-21."
What on earth do they do with that money? You could hire a private tutor per four children for that money and have them do it in the children's homes.
Would end up as a private tutor half-time for two-child families, with them doing homework the other half-time. If you had four children it'd be full-time!
The money isnt evenly distributed at all. Plus, private schools in areas that actually spend 18k/student will cost you more than 18k on their own. Most in the Bay are over 20k now
$8,200 per pupil in Cupertino, $24,700 in Woodside
CUSD is considering closure of three schools and eliminating librarians and art and music due to the failure of passing a parcel tax, and low per-pupil funding. Lots of folks on the street argue “it’s the administrator salaries!” but when you actually look at the budgets there’s just not enough money to keep the schools running. Teachers commute from over the mountains. Administrators are paid reasonably, but that’s the cost when their skill sets would easily apply to project management at a local tech company. Money’s not always the solution but sometimes it is.
Yeah I remember being very surprised at the undergraduate level of math/phys at Bristol (I was there for one year on a student exchange). My classmates (2nd year and 3rd year) had trouble with basic calculus, because they didn't learn it in high school, and then their first year courses had to go easy (superficial) so that not everybody fails. The fact that you choose which questions to answer on the finals is also weird (answer any 3 out of 4 questions).
It doesn't make sense to me that a whole nation skips math (unless you take math A-levels).
I talked to a professor and he explained UGRADs are below level, but then when starting grad school they force everyone up to international level. He showed me a huge room with grad student desks and was like "look, we don't let them get out of here until they learn math properly."
The only aspect that is not distressing is that there is at least one public school teacher who can recognize the futility of trying to simultaneously accommodate students, parents and administration.
The umlauts for quotes thing is really interesting. I don’t know why the author went for “these kids haven’t seen enough ‘proper’ text” rather than, say “these kids weren’t taught typing and discovered a creative solution that communicates their intent well.”
That one left me scratching my head. A physical keyboard has a key specifically for a quote, and entering an umlaut isn’t straightforward on iOS. International keyboard maybe?
The soft bigotry of different standards is talked about but rarely is the premise carefully examined. Can there be a single standard? Maybe the problem is expecting a good essay, composed in earnest, by a kid that can “barely string a sentence together.” We ought not be surprised when humans act human.
Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.
One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
FYI private schools are not immune to these problems. The administration of some private schools choose to have similar policies (accept late work indefinitely, minimum grade of 50%, etc) at their school.
Of course, but it is very much up to the parents which product they want to buy (another problem of private schools to be sure). There are several that focus on rigorous academics, language immersion and even world travel.
They don't necessarily know what is marketing and what they are buying, and the few truly top schools are selective. Private school teachers are also paid less & have worse benefits. It would be great if the private system had it all figured out but they don't.
> lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed.
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
I doubt that these problems are from a lack of funding.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
Majority of education budget goes to paying for pensions of retirees.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
This was a loophole discovered by the homeschoolers - the state could ban homeschooling but the bar for registration as a private school was quite low.
My kids are in their thirties, so it's been a while, but my recollection is there were three legal means to homeschool and registering as a private school was one of them. Another was to hire a tutor for three hours a day.
I think the third was probably to go through an umbrella school, which my family did initially.
Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some are more stringent than California and others less.
> The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.
Why?
You can homeschool your children if you want.
They just have to be at state school during state school hours like anyone else. So you'll have to homeschool in your own time, like everything else you have to do in your own time.
(I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but your argument doesn't make sense regardless.)
Surely you recognize that you're being obtuse with this statement. Otherwise you're suggesting either a zero value for time, or that homeschooling students do their sleeping while at state schools (which is a good recommendation, if you're already stuck attending them.)
> Surely you recognize that you're being obtuse with this statement.
No?
Everyone has to go to school during normal school hours. That's a simple flat rule.
What you do otherwise in your own time to teach about your own values is up to you. That seems completely reasonable, and also practicable for people with particular religious or other social requirements for education, to me.
(If you were in favour of requiring attendance at state education, which I'm not.)
> It’s my understanding that private schools play a minor role in other countries.
Huh my understanding is the opposite!
Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary
The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.
> I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home.
Most homeschooling parents do a variety of things, including teaching in groups with other homeschoolers, and hiring tutors for specialized subjects etc.
If the goal of the ban on private schools as suggested is to force the rich and powerful to send their children to public schools so that they are incentivized to make them better, then you would need to also ban homeschooling because otherwise those people could still school their children privately in cooperation with other rich and powerful parents via the homeschooling model.
If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves.
If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mean the large institutions. I doubt homeschooled people would say that they went to private school.
If it's a legal argument - a blanket ban on private schools would have impact on homeschooling in California - that's likely true, but I'm not suggesting how a law would be written, just the result of the law.
at best you'd move the threshold to remove yourself from the system a little higher, from those paying top dollar private schools to those who can hire tutors and/or have one of the parents dedicated to tutoring
there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling
edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way
I'm not seeing this connection that you and others are making between private schools and tutoring or homeschooling. When I say private schools, I mean it in the sense most people think of private schools: large institutions requiring applications, charging tuition and hiring teachers not related to the students, not "any form of education not provided publicly". I don't think homeschooling fits this definition.
The point is to move the bar for removing yourself higher - systems are complicated, there are no perfect solutions. Of course, people will always find a way - at the very least, they can move to another country. Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
I don't think that bar shift is enough in America - in America, the super-rich control and fund politics, it's not Finland; you're just condemning the kids of the slightly better off to a terrible education and to have it worse than their parents, which is already happening in housing
Private schools are subsidized by the government. Charter schools receive virtually all of their funding from the government. The state could only fund public schools
Alternatively we should ban public schools and force parents to send them to a private school, which if the money that would otherwise have gone to the public school gets sent along with them isn't very expensive (here in Denmark something like 80-90% of the money follows the student).
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
The more likely result of your "solution" is that everyone simple gets a worse education.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
You’re describing Finland. They outlawed private school funding for exactly the reason you’re proposing: to get the wealthiest and most engaged parents invested in fixing public schools for all.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
This is a big oversimplification. There are many differences in education between Finland and the US. Pointing to a single one and declaiming it as the cause is unjustified.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
It's cultural. A school system can only be effective up to a point, but depends mostly on the stock of students/parents involved in the system.
You'll see MA scores among the top states in most forms of human development, so it shouldn't be surprising that the schools reflect that trend. The MA school system is likely not doing anything particularly unique that will be the antidote to failing systems in other states. It's likely the best way to replicate their success in other states lies in policy not directly related to school systems.
It’s a Finland solution to a Finland problem. I don’t intend to suggest it as anything more. Only to show the parent commenter that his/her idea is not so radical; there’s precedent elsewhere in the world.
I think you are into something indeed.
When rich / powerful people have to send their kids to the same schools, it became important to have the best one.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
In France there is a mandatory "map" where you can only send your kids to the nearest public schools.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
Not that simple : back in the days the « carte scolaire » was design to avoid that.
It’s been jerrymandered in the meantime.
But for instance growing up, the big stink was that those poor projects kids we’re in the same middle school that middle class folks. The trick was to pick German to avoid that and be affected to another school.
That describes a lot of the US. Rich people are creating their own country with nice schools and neighborhoods while they never have to interact with the country the rest of people are living in. That's why I am against things like congestion based pricing for toll roads or school funding based on property tax. They give rich people the impression that everyhting is wonderful and no change is needed.
people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
I'm not trying to pressure you or anybody else to agree with me, but personally it was really shocking for me when I realized how segregated the Bay Area actually is: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
There's no way I can look at a divide like the one at the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and not think that ease of access to irl mobility is an issue. Once Upon A Time it was imagined that Phase 2 of BART would run alongside that bridge. There is a bus, but it's not of much use for anybody who needs to work later than 9PM, like many service jobs: https://www.goldengate.org/bus/route-schedule/del-norte-bart...
I don't see what the rest of your comment has anything to do with the discussion at hand. DMVs are terrible everywhere. The DMV in a rich zipcode suffers from the same issues as a DMV in a poor zipcode. Both rich and poor have to use the DMV.
The problem is not that racist white people are trying to run the DMV into the ground to keep black people poor. The problem is that many of our government institutions are run like shit. In many cases, fixing these institutions would benefit the wealthy more than the poor. Yet it doesn't happen. Why? Well, like with any other question regarding complex systems, there are different reasons depending on the case. Trying to distill it down to "racism" does not get as any closer to identifying the cause, nor fixing it.
"people cannot opt out of the DMV and I hear it's still garbage"
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
I don't know where you are in the US, but this won't fix the problem instantly. Even across public schools, there are competitive ones, and there are non-competitive ones. There are high schools where 25% of the class goes to top colleges, and there are high schools where most don't go to college at all. The presence of the 'good' high school drives up property values too.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
I think a better solution is funding students instead of systems. Give everyone the ability to opt out of broken systems, force all schools to compete for students.
And my belief is that we should have educational vouchers that cover the cost of public schools. So parents can choose to send children to public school and apply voucher there, or to spend it as private school. Public schools with low sign-up rate are closed. Trust me, all schools will be reasonably good in the few years.
And where do you send kids after schools are forced to close? Private schools will raise their rates past what vouchers cover, and the poor will be continually left behind while the rich talk about how great choice is.
The people most capable of changing schools are the boardmembers and well funded unions. Private schools are simply the best alternative right now.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
This school sounds like some sort of weird Kafkaesque punishment for kids. Everyone is trying to game it: kids who don't want to write essays, administrators who don't want kids to fail. Teachers who want kids to both learn stuff and pass.
Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you're going to test them, do it in a way that doesn't destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.
> “you’re legally required to assign this much homework, so make sure you do that, only don’t, because the kids are overwhelmed”. That too was in keeping with a theme.
I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling.
If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I'm tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.
In the balance, from talking to teachers a lot of students are really struggling this year with COVID lockdowns, and so I wonder to what extent this is to dampen that. I suspect most will be a little bit behind next year, and it feels like we will have to lean into that.
I cant help but think this is tied to the way government funding for schools is handled. Schools dont want to lose funding by having poor performance so the make the performance measures look better.
> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t.
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldn’t be worth while.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
the more you extend debt financing for a given thing the more expensive something gets... mortgages or student debt. debt is where new money comes from in our financial system...
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadHilarious.
I'm not too familiar with the details of management here, but is it even possible for public schools (and other government operations) to have proper incentives given voters don't care about results? I suppose "school-choice", which happens to be vehemently opposed by Democrats, would be the only way.
Not sure what you mean by “optimizing local maximums at the expense of everything else”. It almost sounds like an argument but there’s no substance.
You claim that public education should focus on the lowest common denominator so we can avoid an underclass susceptible to manipulation. That’s both a weak justification to purposely damage public education and condescension shown by elites when poor people don’t vote the way “they should”.
I’m not saying they’re right to just pass everyone, but it might not be purely selfish on the part of administrators.
I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.
If you had a choice between:
a. doing your job as well as you can, then losing it (and being unemployable forever, quite likely);
b. doing it somewhat worse, but keeping it (and hopefully having a chance to help more students).
What would you do?
Please blame whoever forced this conundrum on teachers. Nonsensical bureaucratic decisions like this are the reason for which I left the profession.
That is simply the top priority of most employees.
https://www.amren.com/features/2020/05/after-twenty-years-wo...
I'm a bit surprised that the Bay Area, one of the wealthiest places in the world, has problems with public schools too. "Public schooling is child abuse" gains more steam every day.
The easiest way to live in the area as a schoolteacher is to marry an engineer or someone else with a home, too.
Letting schools continue to suck with the excuse that they just need more funding is the sickening anti-education policy.
Yes, an organization that is shitty due to bad policies won't improve, and might become worse, when given more funding.
(I went to a tiny rural elementary school located between a tractor supply store and a goat pen. Three teachers taught six grades, two grades per classroom. Compared to the SF schools, it was incredibly under-resourced -- and yet it was a Good School, academically much higher-performing. I think about this sometimes when people point at money as obviously the reason why Johnny can't read.)
> The publication promotes pseudoscientific notions "that attempt to demonstrate the intellectual and cultural superiority of whites and publishes articles on the supposed decline of American society because of integrationist social policies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Renaissance_(magazine...
The question one might ask is, "did the author write this because they're racist, or are they just sharing their experience and no one else would dare publish it?"
Given there are multiple ways of verifying the details, I'd go with "just sharing their experience".
Let's say that there are two races, orange and blue. Alice is orange and goes to a majority-blue church and gets mistreated because of her race. Bob is blue and goes to a majority-orange church and gets mistreated because of his race.
Alice and Bob are both upset about their experiences. They submit articles to "The American Truth," an orange-supremacist newspaper whose stated mission is to convince orange people that they'll never be happy in a society where blue people are treated as equals. Naturally, they publish Alice's article and not Bob's.
Carol is orange and goes to a different majority-blue church and things are totally fine; Dan is blue and goes to a different majority-orange church and things are also totally fine. Eve, who is orange, and Mallory, who is blue, both go to the same church which has a good mix of folks from the two races, and they love it. "The American Truth" is of course totally uninterested in hearing any of these stories.
If you read "The American Truth," you'll think that there's a problem with blue people being intolerant, and you won't be aware of problems with orange people being intolerant, nor will you be aware that, quite possibly, these are both exceptional cases and most orange people and blue people alike are quite tolerant and welcoming and they tend to get along with each other.
And you'll be fine as long as you recognize the biases on both sides and verify claims.
The problem with p-hacking is you need to honestly report the negative results too, not that you need to also find "statistically significant" results reporting the opposite effect.
But yes, if you consciously make an effort to find extremist sources from all possible points of view (and in the real world, that's rarely the same as "both points of view"), and if you make a point of reading them all critically and skeptically, then that is likely to get you a more balanced perspective about things on the margins. Can you find a story about life as a black teacher in a majority-white school published by a black supremacist/separatist organization?
The truth is probably racist. That's how the ship goes down.
No information about author, and published on a site like that because such topics are forbidden, so I wouldn't say that's a good tool for judging the truthfulness/quality.
Have to look at the details and see if they align with what is verifiable.
Some of the claims can be verified by video footage that is widely available online. Many people will still dispute those claims.
> But doing nothing means whites must condemn their own flesh and blood to the nightmare I’ve described — and we have a duty to protect the future for our children.
I'm not familiar with the idea that it's bad for white people to want a good future for their children? Seems quite racist to me.
Next, there's the discipline issue. Yes, they stopped suspending kids in a lot of places because they realized those kids would just be left alone at home all day, and the only reason those kids were at school at all was because it was in some way convenient for their parents.
Finally, there's the homework issue. Yes, homeless is pointless busy work. If something is worth learning, make sure you block off enough time during classroom hours to teach it, otherwise most kids aren't going to learn it at all. Yes, the students are overwhelmed.
We have millions of kids that are from completely broken homes, basic needs like food and housing aren't met, and this person is complaining about book reports? Society is broken.
I think that OP is misconstruing the reasons behind this notification requirement. This notification has to do more with a "cover your ass" policy than lowering expectations for seniors.
The California Education code [1] requires school districts to develop procedures to notify parents of a failing grade. All the CA districts that I worked for had some procedures in place for when and how notify families of failing grades in response to this law. From a quick search, it seems that SFUSD policies 4.2.5 [2] and 4.2.6 apply in this case. The policy clearly states that teachers have to notify parents of grades either 1 or 2 times during the semester (i.e., mid-semester report cards-if you went to school in CA you will remember receiving those).
It seems that OP's school was on a 9-week reporting period, requiring teachers to notify parents of grades mid-semester and that their school added a requirement of filling out an additional form outlining that the student was in danger of failing the class specifically for seniors (probably because most families stopped looking at report cards for seniors). This form is required to be in compliance with the CA ed code as parents have the right to appeal failing grades and not being notified is probably an enough reason for the district to change a failing grade to a passing one in case of a lawsuit/complaint.
I would imagine that failing a class is more "high stakes" for seniors than other students, so they have more paperwork involved for seniors if you want to fail them. Families might be more "litigious" if a student ends up failing a class required for graduation. It is simpler to complain to the board/suing that having to repeat a school year.
The bottom line is that the CA ed code gives teachers final say in grades and even the superintendent cannot change a grade without the teacher's consent. On the other hand, the CA ed code gives some rights to parents to appeal grades and has some notifications guidelines so they shouldn't be surprised of failing grades. OP will be able to fail as many seniors as they want, but they just have to notify their families that they are in danger of failing the class at some point before the end of the semester. At the end of the day, if they have enough evidence for failing a student (that would stand up during a public board meeting/lawsuit), notifying the student's family 9 weeks before the end of the semester shouldn't be too much of a burden.
Links:
[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio.... [2]: ]https://www.sfusd.edu/services/know-your-rights/student-fami...
If this were the reason for the new forms, why would the school only have teachers fill out the form if the student were guaranteed to fail? I'd think the schools would go the opposite direction and make sure to notify all parents whose kids might fail.
"Whenever it becomes evident to a teacher that a student is in danger of failing a course, the teacher shall arrange a conference with the student's parent/guardian or send the parent/guardian a written report. The refusal of the parent to attend the conference, or to respond to the written report, shall not preclude failing the pupil at the end of the grading period. (Education Code 49067)"
The policy clearly states that the student has to be "in danger of failing a course" and not "guaranteed to fail a course". But, if a teacher knows that they might fail a student, they must notify parents by some reasonable deadline (again, it seems that OP's school sets it by week 9 of the semester or by the mid-semester mark). Without this notification, they might not be able to fail a student because they weren't in compliance with the CA ed code and district policy. This becomes even more of an issue when HS graduation is concerned.
I don't know if the forms are new or not. The policy was last updated in 2017 so they are at least 4 years old. What what is worth, I filled out similar forms when I was a teacher 10 years ago in another part of CA, so I suspect that they have been around for longer than that (and the forms were mass produced on carbon paper slips that seemed printed in the 70s). I am also wondering if the word "guaranteed" came up in response to COVID-related changes to grading policies and the district having implemented a credit/no credit grading system.
Links:
[1] Board policy 5121 cf. 6154 para. 4: https://go.boarddocs.com/ca/sfusd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=AKG...
> And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most
I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we gotten to the point where standards are not allowed?
Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.
What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning.
That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.
These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?
The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.
By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades.
Other styles for example, can include things like not changing subjects every hour, but rather continuing until the student is ready to change.
So the issue is that whenever anyone has come up with intervention based on "teaching styles", it has always failed. That is what I mean by "it's not a thing". Here's the APA, in the article "Belief in Learning Styles Myth May Be Detrimental".
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/05/learning-sty...
But if we extend the notion of learning styles to "some kids lack self-control" or "some kids have trouble keeping attention", then I think that's pretty obvious and is another symptom of some kids go through puberty at different times and to different levels of intensity, some people have different levels of self-control or time preference than others. That's just life. Then, the recommendation that kids who disrupt classrooms should be removed from the same classroom as kids who don't makes a lot of sense. Kids who can't sit still should be removed from the class in which they have to sit still, and maybe they can do some outdoor activity. Kids who struggle with a subject should be removed and put into a class where the subject is taught more slowly, etc. That allows kids to reach their potential rather than teaching just to the lowest common denominator. A world in which institutions are geared towards excellence rewards the society as a whole -- perhaps the student who struggles with math can do well in a vocational program and do really well in life. While allowing the kid who can do math really learn as much as they can, so we can have a society in which you can get your home renovated by a general contractor and you can have world class chip fabs, whereas right now, for both we need to import foreign labor since our domestic schools produce neither good vocational skills nor good math skills.
That’s situating the problem in the wrong place. Everyone lacks self control, or has trouble keeping attention depending on the circumstances.
I agree with you that our schools are crap. I also agree that not all kids can be taught everything to the same level.
However that is orthogonal to the notion that kids can be taught to their potential if you allow them to be taught in an appropriate manner.
That ‘teaching styles’ link is accurate, but it deals with a straw man that results from not being willing to question the constraints of school.
I make no judgement on how good or bad it is, but I get why people would be upset by this system.
*or has some mental issues like ADHD or whatever, which a lot of countries do not even recognize as a thing
I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.
Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy to assume that they're going to be the losers in the winner take all economy.
The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
> Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job.
On the contrary, people can be quite explicit about this.
> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.
Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.
That's precisely why low achieving students are separated out. To give them extra help.
High achieving students are easy. Just point them and they go. This is why the second they started standardized testing and separating the students they were able to achieve results with high achievers. But their primary goal with these top-down programs was to actually help the slower students, that were graduating without being literature and whatever. Turns out it's just a really hard problem. It isn't that everyone in education somehow lacks the desire or common sense.
Investing in the most talented can give society outsize returns in terms of innovation, skilled and talented public servants, captivating art, and scientific discoveries.
There's only so much resources you can invest into a single person. Their time is limited, so if their leaning rate is slow, there's really nothing else that can be done beyond some point to speed it up. Forrest Gump will never be Stephen Hawking.
The reality is that this equity movement is motivated specifically by pushing down high-performers. They're removing (or wasting) resources just so that they don't get to the top 10-30%.
I beg to differ! If I have two products and one sells 100x more than the other, I don’t spend my time optimizing the unpopular one.
Wow, I had never read that before:
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
This really captures so much of the current thinking around "equity".
Fortunately, my K-12 education included it as assigned reading :)
It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%.
Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.
Familiar with expensive Private schools Household names send their kids too in CA. It's generally harder to fail a student, sometimes explicitly impossible & against school policy.
In schools with blended ability levels, the worst students do better (pulled up by the higher students), but the best studends do worse.
Good if you are in the bottom, bad ify ou are in the top.
Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools available to top set comprehensive school kids.
It is wrong that children get educations that don't really make the most of their brains because they have parents that couldn't afford it.
Also, I think the sociological benefits of having pupils from all backgrounds occupying the same space and learning from each other as opposed to being segregated is extremely important.
So many of the rich people in charge of the country have absolutely no understanding of poverty because they have not had the opportunity to grow up around it.
Attempts to do this in the US produce results that appear racist.
Try "it's almost as if being societally excluded for centuries is a predictor of social instability," which is both more accurate and descriptive of the problem we're trying to solve here.
How would you do this? It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.
Equally it seems impossible to force the people who would have chosen teaching careers at private schools to work at comprehensive schools.
That, and the fact that one of the ‘resources’ that private schools have is flexibility to make decisions outside of the comprehensive school system.
Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.
I suppose you're saying that some people currently are wealthy enough to send their kids to private school, but choose not to (or don't have kids at all). These people wouldn't have a choice about paying the extra taxes that enable these better-funded comprehensive schools. This isn't a new problem, though, as childless people already pay taxes that are spent on existing comprehensive schools.
As for "decisions outside the comprehensive school system", I think that needs to be considered in the context of the government's existing regulation of private schools and the trend of academisation:
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-13274090
Except it isn’t similar.
Saying ‘taxing the rich more and put more money into public schools’ may be a good proposal but it is a completely different proposition from ‘take the resources from private schools and give them to public schools’.
Money is not in fact educational resources.
I can see how it would probably be a more difficult experience for introverts.
Funnily enough, I got bullied more by the rich kids - who knew how to push my buttons and wind me up to the point I'd lash out and get in trouble - than the poor ones.
If they have objectives like "X% of kids have to graduate", then either you improve the kids' skills, or you lower the requirements for graduation.
For example, in France, the recent governments are extremely happy of the improvement in baccalaureate's success rate (the exam at the end of high-school).
They never talk about the level, but older folks, who sat these exams a few decades ago, always lament that the courses have been dumbed down. Of course the government doesn't agree, but why would it?
This hits very close to home for me, and I've read countless comments on HN from people who are successful in life yet angry and bitter about their K-12 experience.
I don't know the answer to this, but meanwhile, messing with the way school works is not exactly messing with success.
For me the point of a Math class is to learn and demonstrate you understand certain concepts - it isn't to demonstrate some proxy of 'work ethic' because you sat in a desk somewhere on a regular schedule. So there should always be an avenue left open for for the student to learn and demonstrate the knowledge.
I recall one student who flunked thermo. He filed a complaint that the Prof had it in for him, hence the F. The Prof provided evidence that he never did any of the homework, and flunked the midterm and final. Case dismissed. The student dropped out.
In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.
Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone.
Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).
But the folks making decisions about education in California (including the authors of the California Math Framework 2021) believe they'll achieve better outcomes that way, than they will by grouping students based on their progress in the subject.
I heard recently from a 6th grade math teacher who has students who are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 grades behind.
Imagine orchestrating a single class in which you're teaching some children about adding single-digit numbers, and others about long division.
The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck.
There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once.
We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it.
When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.
I guess in Montessori every single student isn't learning something different, but each one is often in a unique state of learning and development. The guide gives lessons in small groups, less than 6. Each kid gets a new lesson every few days and spends the remainder of their time "doing their work" (practicing their lessons and turning the results into the guide, doing small group research projects, etc.). The kid is encouraged to ask others for help understanding the lesson and to mentor others who are working on a lesson the kid knows. Once the guide observes the kid succeeding at the lesson, the kid is invited to the next lesson.
In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)
Nowadays you also have the internet that can fill those gaps. If a student wants to learn, then there are many opportunities. But students usually don't want to.
If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout.
I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.
All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.
It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test.
> those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities
That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems.
> And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.
The upper middle class is where it's actually interesting. There aren't enough wealthy people for the SAT to be a driver of mass inequality. They're already sending their kids to elite private schools, so as long as the Ivies keep favoring those schools, the status quo remains. The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests. Those aren't that expensive. Anyone working class or higher can afford them. SAT classes help somewhat, but less than being somewhat familiar with the test. They're moderately expensive. Tutors are where it's interesting, and that's in upper middle class territory.
Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.)
Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic.
As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them is nonsense.
I have no idea if the relative quality of today's Caltech freshman body is better or the same as in my day.
I flipped through an SAT vocabulary builder book the other day. I knew nearly all the words in it already. Vocabulary is something that happens organically, by reading a lot and looking into complex things. I suspect that memorizing word lists builds a fake vocabulary. Some people have told me they recognize when someone sprinkles their language with the daily word they memorized. It comes off as pretension, not education.
I suspect that if SAT training involves learning fake knowledge and test taking tricks, anyone who gets into Caltech via that method is going to find they're in the wrong place. Students there like to sit in the halls and talk about ways to build a warp drive. Students who don't belong will be watching the game on TV.
One of my good friends there had an apartment off campus. He'd regularly make his special chicken wings and invite all comers (this was not to be missed). The apartment manager would come, too, and he'd just quietly sit off in a corner by himself, munching on chicken wings.
I asked him once why he was there - he didn't participate, and he was way way older. He replied, "oh, this is incredibly fun. I've never ever heard people talk like this before. I just like to listen."
And also - I agree - I never really learned “grammar rules” or the details of writing. I just learned from listening, talking, and reading many many books in elementary and middle school. To prepare for a test by memorizing vocab seems inherently the wrong approach.
I heard something on This American Life, I think, about a "strong student" from a bad high school doing poorly on the SAT. I got the impression she hadn't prepared at all...which seems odd for a strong student when there are free resources.
> memorizing vocab
The College Board got called out for some of this after the "regatta" incident. It turns out rich kids were much more likely to know the term for a boat race. Oops.
I'm really curious to see the outcomes of the no-SAT cohort of college students, once the 2020-2021 year is ignored, data cleaned, etc. Even if GPA was enough in 2020, it seems like it would get harder and harder to compare schools over time without a standardized test.
I was just a kid. I didn't hang out in bars. I had no idea what the contents of a martini were.
I thought it was unfair, and was so annoyed I still recall it :-)
I read a great deal as a kid, too. Mostly scifi :-)
I made the mistake of attempting to learn German by memorizing. But who can remember which nouns go with der, die, or das? Not me. I bet the right way is to simply read the newspaper every day, looking up the words one doesn't know, one by one.
Isn't there a common application, now?
In hindsight, boomers had a really easy time of it, even some we rightly revere for their contributions. Work hard, or be brilliant, or some combination of the two. That’s not enough today. Ken Thompson told the story somewhere of being literally chased down the east coast after graduation by Bell Labs recruiters. That would never happen now.
Things are a bit less competitive on the subject tests. A couple questions wrong was still sufficient to get an 800 on Math level II my year.
Math competitions are nothing like the SAT. Not at all. You can grind your way to an 800 on the math SAT with a basic prep and an understanding of tenth-grade math; getting a perfect score on a math competition is something only a handful of people do each year. The hardest questions tend to be of the type "ok I am not even sure how to start this one" rather than "this one has a bunch of arithmetic and I'm not sure I have time to complete it".
NCLB didn't do that, and expired in 2007.
Is that a SF thing? Because normally that is not true.
> Why do we have grades at all?
Class rankings, scholarships. Even besides that, it lets parents know how well or not their child is learning.
> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam
> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.
It’s easy to recover from if you don’t use a stupid method if aggregation, but that takes actually thinking about what it is you are trying to measure; for instance, if you grade by % in each of several competency areas throughout the year, and have a final grade catehory standards (cumulative, so you get the highest grade where you’ve met all the standards):
D: median of competency area medians meets minimum proficiency standard
C: median score within every competency area meets minimum passing standard
B: median of competency area medians meets high proficiency standard or median in at least one competency area meets excellence standard
A: median of competency area medians exceeds excellence standard
(standards might be something like passing 70%, high proficiency 80%, excellence 90%, but the exact numbers aren’t the point.)
That will give you a measure of overall competence that isn't particularly sensitive to outlier scores on a single assignment, even if the assignment has components across many competency areas.
* Several easy math problems
* Unlimited re-tests
* You had to get 100% to pass
The same lesson is not being given over and over again.
There are X tests/assignments/projects for X areas covered.
Each is assessed in its turn.
Of course, there is usually some overall assessment on the content as a whole, at the end of a quarter/semester/year. I think that aligns perfectly with your desire.
I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.
Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time.
I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather than learning.
I went to three high schools. Two were public, and one private.
All a bit different. The private one had way too many kids on drugs.
If anyone has a responsible kid who is thinking about dropping out, certain schools allow kids to go to CC early.
Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.
Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.
We don't want to fail kids consistently and put these huge marks in their psyche because they were not 'good at some thing'.
HS needs to teach the basics of course, beyond that it should be encouraged and supported.
My personal academic inclination didn't even start turning on seriously until I was very fortunate enough to get into a good Grad School and the fraternal competition sparked something I didn't know existed.
Kicking kids out of school permanently is the best way to make sure they end up on the streets, rugs, crimes gangs etc..
The funny part of 'On-Campus' suspension is that ... 'On-Campus' is the smartest thing in the article. Having to actually show up for school is much worse than not being in school! So that's a better 'punishment'. Maybe they should be required to read a book!
Guys like to focus on projects and applied things, I suggest 1/2 of high school past age 15 should be applied learning, projects. Literally anything that people engage with and learn from. And as a non-athlete, terrible at sports klutz, I would say 'gym class every day' would be ideal as well. 20% 'training' type stuff and the rest just fun sports.
Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester".
To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing?
And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it.
If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed.
However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
So despite getting nearly perfect scores on my tests and quizzes, being recruited for the math team (by this same teacher), and learning Calculus early (by way of a math tutor my mom got me when she was freaked out about my grade — he taught me FORTRAN and Calculus but my Algebra II grade was still subpar), I wound up with an 81% in the class, which at that time, was a C.
This immediately negatively impacted my GPA in a way that not only was difficult to recover from, but also basically soured me on the whole concept of grades and GPAs anyway. This was in an affluent suburban public school setting where everyone is competing against each other for the best test scores/grades to get into the best schools. But despite being an incredibly bright student, that school did everything it could to ruin my motivation. If my GPA was going to always be shitty, what was the point of trying? What was the point of taking the advanced math classes? I might as well just play dumb and coast. I could still use some math in other areas, but why challenge myself?
So I did. I dropped to honors math after freshmen year and ultimately was in a pilot test an online math class which was probably only general ed. I had a high aptitude for math that I utterly ignored/hid for years (in college, this presented a problem b/c I tested too high for the basic math classes and was put into advanced classes after several years of almost zero classroom instruction…this wasn’t great), and although I never would have been a math major, a different approach to grades may at least have prevented me from being utterly turned off by math for such a long time.
In contrast, I was much more successful convincing some of my English teachers to let me escape bullshit busywork/homework. Rather than doing vocabulary assignments, I just told my teacher what each word meant verbally. It saved us both time and he would assign me different types of essays and grade me at a higher level than my peers. Another English teacher was swayed by my argument that a book we were studying in class was trash (it was mandated by the county that she teach it), so she allowed me to write an essay arguing that T.H. White was a misogynist (using secondary sources and other scholarship to bolster my argument) and based her quizzes on the book on the Spark Notes version so I wouldn’t have to spend too much time with the text. Again, I was fifteen and opposed to studying the book on some immature grounds of principle, but those teachers recognized the performative and stupid nature of homework or required reading for what they were and worked with the gifted student rather than against her. In retrospect, it probably isn’t surprising that I spent the first decade of my career as a writer and journalist and only switched to engineering four years ago.
The ultimate k...
But most of those are angry and bitter because of the social aspects, and because it wasted their time. I don't recall ever reading here that someone was angry and bitter because the grading system burned them.
If a 50 can keep them statistically in the game, with a chance of turning it around and passing, that might be worth it. It's similar logic to not giving life sentences. People with no hope of a good outcome are harder to deal with. A kid with a 22% average that you have to deal with for 12 more weeks must be a nightmare. They have no incentive to try at all, or to let the class proceed in an orderly wat.
And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But at least it's mathematically possible for more of the year.
You’re half right.
Most school districts won’t let a student with a 50% average pass.
That said, teachers will be pressed to give extra points for participation or extra credit or just to change the scores to get said kid over a passing level. Some teachers will do this unprompted just to make sure they don’t have to see the kid next year.
Not to mention that there will undoubtedly be calls of some sort of discrimination if failing grades are common in any given teacher’s class.
You’d be wrong to assume that. Here’s a kid that made it to 12th grade having only ever passed 4 classes. 0.13 GPA, and that actually put him in the top 50% of his class. Things are much, much worse than you think.
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student...
If they can’t do the work you need to let them know at some point. Not sure delaying the news is that helpful!!
Though I do agree that we should focus on the chance of turning it around. Students who score poorly early on and then score well later should be extra rewarded, not held down by their past performance.
The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.
https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/
There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions.
Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentioned the act. (Folks informed his employer, and he was fired.)
I find this situation baffling.
The board opened some schools for a single day at the end of the school year, just to qualify for state funding to pay teachers.
The board spent time (whilst schools were closed) deciding how to rename schools, something which has zero impact on educational outcomes.
The board has a member who made racist remarks on Twitter and, despite not losing her position, is suing the school board: https://missionlocal.org/2021/03/alison-collins-school-board...
These are other reasons to be dissatisfied.
More concerning to some people is that becoming a member of the SFBOE is a common launching point for the SF Board of Supervisors.
Kids weren't vaccinated.
A large unvaccinated reservoir population in constant contact with the vaccinated population is how you breed variants that are, e.g., more dangerous to young people (like Delta already is) and more likely to break through existing vaccines (which Delta also is, though not intensely so from the information I've seen.)
Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used only when really unavoidable, but to claim kids are a-OK and shouldn't be vaccinated ain't based on science I've read so far.
> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.
> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.
> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.
> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.
SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.
This is relevant because younger kids need more supervision and are less likely to spread COVID, while older kids need less supervision and are more likely to spread; therefor keeping older kids home and sending younger ones in might be totally rational. But it doesn’t seem like this gets brought up.
I'd like to expand on this one, as it's been a particular frustrating one. It launched San Francisco's school system into the national spotlight as our Board of Education debated this publicly and initially planned to spend millions of dollars before the outrage and backlash canceled these plans.
Amongst other issues, they did short, haphazard research on the origins of the names of the schools, instead typing common Hispanic surnames into Google/Wikipedia, finding the first result, and deciding that the word colonizer being mentioned in the Wikipedia article was sufficient to rename the school. They problem? Wrong person, they didn't bother to look so far as the school's website to determine who it was named after. Here's a video of the full deliberation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1jj33NBAH8
Some articles summarizing other issues with this process: https://abc7news.com/sfusd-san-francisco-unified-schools-dis...
While here, I'd also like to throw in this article about Alison Collins, the school board member who is suing her colleagues and the city for $87 million dollars: https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/Alis...
During the pandemic, the Board of Education announced that 44 schools were named after oppressors (many were justified, but the names committee also made numerous errors) and that principals and families needed to come up with new names for their schools over Zoom. Board member Gabriela Lopez defended even the egregious mistakes, demonstrating that she only cares about “uplifting” and “holding” people of color but not facts https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-ren... Unfortunately, Lopez is not up for recall yet, but her enablers are.
Alison Collins led the resolution to remove academic admissions to San Francisco’s magnet high school Lowell High. But instead of debating the pros and cons of having a magnet school, she caricatured the school as bed of “toxic racism” and dismissed the Asian parents who supported an admissions criteria as “a bunch of racists”. https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1316582760954331136?l... Afterwards, people discovered her previous tweets stereotyping Asians and her pattern of abusing her power (https://twitter.com/hknightsf/status/1391039211747172352). When her colleagues selected a different Vice President, she lashed out with a lawsuit calling her opponents racists (https://missionlocal.org/2021/04/alison-collins-strange-and-...)
The other board members haven't done anything offensive but haven't shown any leadership either. They just enabled the radicals. We don't know exactly why SFUSD didn't open the schools this year (negotiations were behind closed doors), but I suspect it has to do with the board members' extreme deference to the teachers' union that endorsed them.
I encourage anyone who is a San Francisco citizen to print out the recall petitions and mail them in https://recallsfschoolboard.org/
See also this explainer The Case for Recalling the School Board https://www.engardio.com/blog/school-board-recall-case
> that's not a good enough reason
On the contrary, it's hard to think of more salient reason than that.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I wanted my child to go back to school ASAP, but then I reminded by a teacher friend that their health was important, too.
I believe no one should be forced to work if the health conditions are unsafe, why should teachers exempt form this? There are too many examples of teachers who did die from COVID-19.
https://www.whsv.com/2021/02/17/ny-teacher-dies-from-covid-1...
https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/politics/nobody-knows-how-...
The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?
https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531
But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.
If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.
> either we must assume that they are less smart … or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination
The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
What do we do about these 10 year olds? We assume they are not "high school" material and we put them in the school for dumb kids? Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them and so the school system can't do anything about it?
> The failure of schooling starts much earlier than the admissions test, and it is wrong to infer from disparities in test results that the test itself is racist (as the ringleaders of the SF Board of Education assumed).
The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism. We are talking about a high-school, which enrols 12 year olds to teach them basic trigonometry and some basic notions of history and literature (in the best case scenario) and not about Hydra hiring PhD candidates to build a death ray. When properly motivated, everybody with a 80+ IQ can succeed in high school, one may argue that you could pick them at random.
Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork.
> The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism
No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
Ok, but you haven't answered my question
> No. You need to look at confounding variables, not just race. It could be that a large percentage of black children in this area come from poor families and must therefore work part-time jobs after school instead of studying. That’s just one example of many possibilities. “Correcting” the problem by putting these children into this special school does nothing to change their poverty: they still must work after school and can’t study. And that means they can’t keep up with the other children in this privileged school. Your solution is probably to make the schoolwork easier and force everyone to suffer the same fate. My solution is to give that family money so their high school kid doesn’t have to work to help support his family.
Children not being able to write a good essay when they are 10 because they have to work, is quite a degenerate case and I hope it is not the norm for those who are not admitted at this special school. The majority of 10-year-old kids, who aren't employed in violation of child labour laws, are smart enough to attend highschool without the need to make schoolwork easier.
> In reality, your solution is the one that gets chosen because of the wokeness movement.
This wokeness movement is not something I'm familiar with or affiliated to.
Your question was “Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them”.
I did indirectly. To be more explicit, I suspect the common answer is no: They do not care about school because they have other, more pressing needs besides school.
> when they are 10 because they have to work
If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Use your imagination.
So, the answer is: no, these kids are not broken.
> If you want to focus solely on 10 year olds and not teenagers, and ignore that I wrote working is “just one example of many possibilities” , then you are probably purposely missing my point.
You said kids can't write essay because they have to work. It sounds rather absurd to me.
> I agree most 10 year olds are not working. Substitute “working” or “poverty” with some other problem at home and you’ll get the same result. Alcoholic parent, drug addicted parent, parent with major mental illness, homeless parent, absent parents, foster home life, etc.
Fine, so we are excluding them because they are poor or disadvantaged, which was my initial point. And we are calling it "merit" because we ask them to write an essay.
> we are calling it "merit"
It sounds like you’re arguing about who deserves the prestige of going to Lowell rather than who actually benefits and contributes to the experience of attending classes at Lowell, which is the most populous school in San Francisco and has fairly large class sizes and tough grading.
Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
As we agreed that social economic background is a major predictor of admission, claiming that poor kids can’t benefit nor contribute to the experience of attending this school is a weirdly classist statement. It is also based on the assumption that to be able to read 3 novels in a year and to learn the cosine law, one must be a particularly gifted kid and not just a random 10, 13 or 16 year old.
Highschool prestige is a concept that I understand but I that I don't accept. Like I understand why some primitive tribes practiced human sacrifices, but I wouldn’t let them do such thing near me. So I’m not arguing for that. But if we accept that highschool prestige increases your chances in life, then state schools should distribute this privilege equally.
> Instead of pretending that all students are equally prepared for class or that every teacher is prepared to serve every kind of student at the same time, reformers should try to figure out exactly what the students such as the ones in the article need for motivation. It doesn’t mean that they lack "merit" or that people who don’t want to go to a competitive college are bad people. It’s ok to acknowledge that different people have different needs.
I insist that we should reason on why some minorities are significantly underrepresented. We may conclude that only gifted kids can attend this very important school and that kids from minorities are less likely to be gifted, but I wouldn’t be too sure of either.
If we find out that, say, blacks are significantly underrepresented because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds, then the admission process is at least classist, knowingly or otherwise. We may also argue that it perpetuates class and racial differences. Claiming that these kids have inherently different needs is like saying that my child should become an engineer because I’m well off, so he needs to learn advanced maths and whatever, and these children should serve food and clean toilets because they are poor, and they only need to learn who’s the boss. This is, like it or not, very very classist.
No.
Honestly dude, go fuck yourself!
So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send your kid to school where they learn nothing (maybe get a tutor and self-learn?), send them to a private high school which costs north of $50k/year in SF (some are more like $65k... and that is IF you can get in!), or you move somewhere else. But there has been a country-wide effort to dumb down public schools combined with softer discipline (thanks to lawsuit fears), so you might simply end up at a private school anyway.
Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.
If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.
I also think there's a value to be had in having the over-acheivers and under-acheivers together in the same social setting of school, if not in the same classes.
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not akin to burning libraries.
> So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for?
Changing the admission criteria of a highschool is not the same as dumbing it down (whatever that is supposed to mean). In Europe children are not required to write essay or complete extracurricular activities to enroll in highschools or middleschools, and they are not generally dumber than the Americans.
> Add this together and you can see how pushing equitable results by attacking merit-based options only widens class and economic divides.
The admission criteria of a highschool do not necessarily reward merit. They are more likely to reward having been tutored on how to write highschool admission essays.
In some countries, the differentiation starts even much earlier than that, with 8 year long "gymnasiums".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school)
First of all you don’t have to attend the school your teachers advised, you can still attend a Gymnasium if your teachers said you should go to a Hamptschule. So it’s significantly different from the selection criteria of that American high school.
Then this selection process is known to be biased against children of foreigners. Somebody said that without strict competition in high school admissions we wouldn’t have playstations and covid vaccines, so it’s useful to know that the founder and CEO of BioNTech (who is a Turk-German) was advised to go to a Hamptschule by his primary school teachers. So he wouldn’t have been able to attend university.
Said that, having a brother that works as a teacher in a Gymnasium, I insist that these kids are not learning anything esoteric or peculiarly complicated. If the average kid in an upper middle class neighbourhood returns an assignment with less than one typo per row, he would be remembered for years.
I had to do an admissions test, plus average grade from primary school (50-50 scoring ratio, if I remember correctly).
They score everyone, and put them on a list. The top gets in. The rest, good luck, try somewhere else.
So it's not random.
There is a major downside to selectivity as it's done right now, which is that you end up with a competitive pressure cooker in that program since the student body will mostly consist of kids with highly driven parents who demand top-of-class academic results, every assignment perfect. It makes kids anxious-to-suicidal depending on how much pressure they experience, but it doesn't make them uniformly better at the material; depending on the subject and the student, either they're way ahead or they are really struggling, and if they are already doing some work to think about the material, "study harder, do more homework" doesn't really increase that rate, it just makes them more performative and "grade-grubbing". And this doesn't change when you look at secondary education either; there are many "tough" and "competitive" colleges, but they don't turn out graduates that are of equivalently greater skill.
But that does not mean that dumbing down is a good idea! Selectivity within each school, and making greater use of online learning to offer advanced, fine-grained tracking, gets to the good part of selectivity, which is that learning becomes more focused on individual student needs. "Staying with the class" is in many ways the worst part of school and absolutely shouldn't be the thing to emphasize, whether we're talking about high-flying academics or troubled delinquents and special ed students.
No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can.
The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up enthusiastically working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I doubt there will ever be a way to satisfactorily control for other variables when it comes to these sorts of real-life studies (there is a reason the majority of social science isn't reproducible[1])
[1] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/21/eabd1705
My guess is it is similar to IQ results - does a good job weeding out people who know nothing, but does worse differentiating between students who are satisfactory and those who are exceptional
I know that personally my grades don't tend to correlate with my actual knowledge at all. I've failed things because I've been bored with them, and I've gotten perfect grades on things I don't understand at all outside the tested material.
> We estimate several models with an extensive list of control variables and high school fixed effects. Results consistently show that high school GPA is a positive and statistically significant predictor of educational attainment and earnings in adulthood. Moreover, the coefficient estimates are large and economically important for each gender.
> No iphones, electric cars, or covid vaccines, for example.
Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever?
We are not talking about taking advantage of excellence, which starts to become visible after highschool. We are talking about 10-year-olds who go to school to be taught the fundamental theorem of arithmetics.
> Even the communists realized that when you've got smart students, take advantage and educate them as best you can. > The third reich idiotically drove out their best scientists, who wound up working for the Allies developing the technology that defeated the reich.
I don't know what the communists and the nazists have to do with changing the admission criteria of a high school. I suppose it's a way of expressing disagreement in American English?
Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes.
https://www.caltech.edu/about/legacy/awards-and-honors/nobel...
BTW, I think the mRNA vaccine technology is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Don't you?
Caltech requires 10-year-old kids to write essays?
Again, are we talking about enrolling 10-year-old kids in highschool or are we talking about hiring microbiologists?
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
Anyway, so you should not have been admitted but you succeeded anyway without being a gifted kid? It seems like you have proved my point.
Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.
And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.
Except of course for the founders of BoiNTech: Uğur Şahin, and Özlem Türeci.
Included to the point they got German government-funded PhDs and then other native Germans helped co-found their company.
Perhaps you hypothesis needs more data and less feelings?
Unless, of course, you buy into all that dishwasher to millionaire you can achieve anything if you want but don't expect a helping hand BS.
Is this what the evidence suggests or what you wish to be true?
Yes, evidence suggests that blacks and Indians and whatnot are not dumber than whites and that foreigners are not dumber than the locals.
As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.
Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.
Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.
This seems achievable by the 8th grade.
> In 2017, the United States spent $14,100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 37 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries... https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
Schools are often the safety net for youths with a wide range of problems. While schools are the catch all for such problems, they're more expensive than fixing other issues like fair wages for the parents of the students (e.g. having hischoolers needing to get a job to support the family rather than study for school).
This high price tag is the result of shifting around other issues to the place where they're inefficiently handled.
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The flip side of this is the "schools are often funded by property taxes and areas that are able to collect more taxes are able to spend significantly more per student even if it doesn't result in a better outcome." Many of these areas already have good student outcomes and the money is spent on on... whatever.
Palo Alto spends $24.5k/student ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?I... ).
Wyoming county schools spends $11.5k ( https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/districtsearch/district_detail.asp?S... ).
When looking at those, compare the breakdown of revenue sources.
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So, I'll say "no, we're not - but it's not the fault of the schools."
Most adults don't seem to be able to do these things well though, so I obviously have a skewed perspective.
I really doubt high school helps with this.
One disruptive kid can prevent 20 kids from learning. Look, the kid may have reason. His parents abandoned him, he's hungry, whatever. And it's not fair to just drop him because his parents did. But it's also not fair to let him keep everyone else from learning.
> consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes
US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
Sounds like another MacOS "why not use random unicode characters that look similar to the one you really want" feature to me.
letter+quotation mark is a common way to write umlauts...
"Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021-22 reflects the significant allocation of one-time federal funds in 2020-21."
[0]: www.ebudget.ca.gov/2021-22/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Education.pdf
Lol what?
What on earth do they do with that money? You could hire a private tutor per four children for that money and have them do it in the children's homes.
Would end up as a private tutor half-time for two-child families, with them doing homework the other half-time. If you had four children it'd be full-time!
$8,200 per pupil in Cupertino, $24,700 in Woodside
CUSD is considering closure of three schools and eliminating librarians and art and music due to the failure of passing a parcel tax, and low per-pupil funding. Lots of folks on the street argue “it’s the administrator salaries!” but when you actually look at the budgets there’s just not enough money to keep the schools running. Teachers commute from over the mountains. Administrators are paid reasonably, but that’s the cost when their skill sets would easily apply to project management at a local tech company. Money’s not always the solution but sometimes it is.
It doesn't make sense to me that a whole nation skips math (unless you take math A-levels).
I talked to a professor and he explained UGRADs are below level, but then when starting grad school they force everyone up to international level. He showed me a huge room with grad student desks and was like "look, we don't let them get out of here until they learn math properly."
What educational outcome do these groups expect?
Maybe we should redefine public education to be a bit more exclusive, and not shame those that aren’t on a college track into pursuing mentally challenging work for which we are unfit. Give kids the money that would be spent on their education (loosely defined) and let them invest it, or spend on vocational training or seed money to start their own small business. Too much focus on producing som eidetic notion of the educated individual. People don’t wind up homeless because they weren’t exposed to Shakespeare. Some people will be lucky to attain enough basic skill to stay afloat. If such a person is able to fool plagiarism software, maybe that’s something to celebrate.
Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
It ends up selecting for people who are more transient and have less experience, who haven't gotten the better Public school job yet.
> The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
They theoretically have more control over expulsions, but whether or not they use it really depends on the school.
I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.
From a systems point of view though - why would businesses move to SF if it meant bad schools? The answer right now is because the leadership can opt out and go into the private system, but if that wasn't the case, I think there would be a lot of incentive on the city to fix these problems.
There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.
What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.
The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.
The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.
It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.
I think the third was probably to go through an umbrella school, which my family did initially.
Homeschooling laws vary by state. Some are more stringent than California and others less.
No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’.
The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.
Why?
You can homeschool your children if you want.
They just have to be at state school during state school hours like anyone else. So you'll have to homeschool in your own time, like everything else you have to do in your own time.
(I'm not in favour of banning private schools, but your argument doesn't make sense regardless.)
No?
Everyone has to go to school during normal school hours. That's a simple flat rule.
What you do otherwise in your own time to teach about your own values is up to you. That seems completely reasonable, and also practicable for people with particular religious or other social requirements for education, to me.
(If you were in favour of requiring attendance at state education, which I'm not.)
I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home.
Clearly rules could be in place to separate those concerns apart.
Huh my understanding is the opposite!
Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_High_School#Nota...
The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.
Most homeschooling parents do a variety of things, including teaching in groups with other homeschoolers, and hiring tutors for specialized subjects etc.
If the goal of the ban on private schools as suggested is to force the rich and powerful to send their children to public schools so that they are incentivized to make them better, then you would need to also ban homeschooling because otherwise those people could still school their children privately in cooperation with other rich and powerful parents via the homeschooling model.
If you're making a slippery slope argument - the answer is that there is a difference between a private school with administration, dedicated real estate and staff teaching 100s of kids, and people keeping their kids home to teach them themselves.
If it's a semantic argument, that homeschooling is a form of non-public and therefore private education, by private schools I specifically mean the large institutions. I doubt homeschooled people would say that they went to private school.
If it's a legal argument - a blanket ban on private schools would have impact on homeschooling in California - that's likely true, but I'm not suggesting how a law would be written, just the result of the law.
there's no effective way to ban private tutoring in the sense and effect of this thread that doesn't also involve banning homeschooling
edit: or simply send the kids abroad, the classic rich-person-in-failed-society way
The point is to move the bar for removing yourself higher - systems are complicated, there are no perfect solutions. Of course, people will always find a way - at the very least, they can move to another country. Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
No, the point was to make the people with the power to do something about it be forced to use public schools.
Just moving the bar a bit higher would have no such effect.
> Right now though a significant number of people opt out of the public system and I think that's a huge problem.
Why? What’s wrong with thinking the public school system is bad (which it obviously is) and doing something better for you child?
Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.
Things are usually not solved by making things worse for everyone.
Instead, the solution, to most problems, is to try to help more people, instead of trying to stop others from being too good at educating their children.
It worked. They have one of the best public education systems in the world.
As a counter example, the OECD PISA ranking for education puts Estonia as just barely ahead of Finland[1]. Estonia has public and private schools[2]. So, it is at least possible to have Finland quality schools while maintaining a public and private system.
Another thing to consider would be the population differences. The US has ~65 times more people than Finland. In this larger group of people there will be Finland sized subgroups that outperform and underperform Finland even though the US as a whole underperforms.
Massachusetts, for example, one of two states in the US to perform and report their own PISA numbers, is pretty comparable to Finland in 2015 (1 or 2 points above or below on scores of ~500 for science and reading and 11 points below on math)[3]. I couldn't find the official OECD results for 2018, but I believe Massachusetts is slightly ahead by then.
1 - https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/education/
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Estonia
3 - https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-United-States-MA.pdf
You'll see MA scores among the top states in most forms of human development, so it shouldn't be surprising that the schools reflect that trend. The MA school system is likely not doing anything particularly unique that will be the antidote to failing systems in other states. It's likely the best way to replicate their success in other states lies in policy not directly related to school systems.
But let’s me add some counter example for the sake of it.
here is public high school, with « famous »teacher and kids clearly coming from the wealthy élites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Henri-IV
The trick is that the selection process is so stringent that you basically have to be :
- a genious in getting excellent grade according to the French system or … - have parents that coach you to get in there.
Here is another similar public high school.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyc%C3%A9e_Louis-le-Grand
Again, I mostly agree with you point. But dépending of the country, a private education can be seen of « bad taste »
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
So you've got "good" ones and "bad" ones depending on the neighborhood. So, yes, the best high schools are public, in areas with high rents and property prices.
Additionally, the best high schools select their students on academics, proof of residence, cover letter, letters from former teachers, etc. [1]
https://lycee-henri4.com/admission-2/
But for instance growing up, the big stink was that those poor projects kids we’re in the same middle school that middle class folks. The trick was to pick German to avoid that and be affected to another school.
for some reason, the US never mastered publicly run institutions and they seem to attract the kind of people who run them into the ground
I do agree that the fact that lobbyists and major donors being able to remove themselves from the social consequences of the policies they help implement is a major problem in the American political system; cronyism is out of control and the political funding system is a scandal
This is by design, sadly, because the "wrong people" might benefit from them. But hey we have MLK Day and Juneteenth now so we fixed racism :)))))
I'm not trying to pressure you or anybody else to agree with me, but personally it was really shocking for me when I realized how segregated the Bay Area actually is: http://radicalcartography.net/index.html?bayarea
There's no way I can look at a divide like the one at the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and not think that ease of access to irl mobility is an issue. Once Upon A Time it was imagined that Phase 2 of BART would run alongside that bridge. There is a bus, but it's not of much use for anybody who needs to work later than 9PM, like many service jobs: https://www.goldengate.org/bus/route-schedule/del-norte-bart...
150 years ago...
I don't see what the rest of your comment has anything to do with the discussion at hand. DMVs are terrible everywhere. The DMV in a rich zipcode suffers from the same issues as a DMV in a poor zipcode. Both rich and poor have to use the DMV.
The problem is not that racist white people are trying to run the DMV into the ground to keep black people poor. The problem is that many of our government institutions are run like shit. In many cases, fixing these institutions would benefit the wealthy more than the poor. Yet it doesn't happen. Why? Well, like with any other question regarding complex systems, there are different reasons depending on the case. Trying to distill it down to "racism" does not get as any closer to identifying the cause, nor fixing it.
But is it, though? I get the impression these complaints run mostly on inertia. In the last 5 years I've been to DMVs in Missouri, New York, and Rhode Island and I've never waited long (they take appointments now at many branches), the people were friendly, their websites explained exactly what I needed to bring, and so on.
The experience was fine.
And yet I keep hearing about how awful the DMV is. I get it; nobody really wants to be at the DMV, but I didn't walk away from those experiences aghast at the dysfunction.
There are still huge discrepancies across public schools.
If you ban private schools, people will “group homeschool”. If you ban homeschooling, parents can pack cigarettes in their kid’s lunch sack until they are sent to continuation school where attendance isn’t required. Then the child is free to attend a “group tutoring academy”.
The solution is to make public education easier to reform by the members of the community.
Motivate the kids. Show them stuff about the world, and show them how to find out things for themselves. If you're going to test them, do it in a way that doesn't destroy all enjoyment of the subject. Try to get the kids to want to keep learning after they leave you.
I think the underlying theme is that the parents themselves are overwhelmed and the schools that were ill-equipped to handle education before COVID-19 are crumbling.
If I take this report at face value (which, frankly, I'm tempted to), it paints an even more broken image of the American school system than the dumpster fire I had on my wall already.
There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.
And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.
now the second part of your proposal, would be interesting. but in practice if you combine both parts probably they would extremely aggressively filter students
As they told us repeatedly, it's a privilege to be here. Although they had the option to boot us out, no one was, and only one guy bailed out of 50.
All such effort in the name of equity will hurt the kids whose families can't afford proper education. Eventually there will be larger degree of inequity. The best students, namely the future elites, will be okay, as they will find ways to educate themselves one way or another. The worst students, those "single student who struggled most", will be okay too, as they got all the attention they need. It is unfortunately the students in the middle, the backbone of our society, who would get hurt, like the straight-A student reported by NYT who couldn't even pass city college's math placement tests. Or the intern who just got fired because he couldn't even understand that finding the values of two variables needs a system of two independent equations.