No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction.
When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed -- then I'm less worried.
Demanding mental assent to questionable claims to avoid punishment, regardless of questions about the predictive failure or successful outcomes of testing the hypotheses underlying those claims seems ... culty.
And, there's a lot of that in modern public schooling.
The first thing I ask my daughter whenever someone tells her to believe something, is "how could you know?". Quite often, the claimant has assiduously avoided informing her about how they "know" their claim is true. It's astonishing.
I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include:
- Political fear-mongering set up by pro-privatization groups that want to profit off of
- The fact that schooling is difficult. Middle school and high school are challenging ages and no school can make the experience go perfectly.
- Anti-institution ideology spread through social media. I think a lot of groups online feel empowered to find alternatives and spread the word even if they are not statistically better outcomes.
Obviously the public school system isn’t perfect. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Not all districts are doing so well. But for the most part, engaged and supportive parents of kids in an average school system results in good outcomes.
Un-schooling isn’t the answer. It’s the Un-answer.
>I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include:
By almost any objective metric, there is something wrong with the school system, and the fact that this isn't something people admit is probably a reason there is a lot of pushback against it. People in support of the public school system aren't even willing to educate themselves on its failures and weaknesses.
>even if they are not statistically better outcomes.
So here once again you're saying there are not statistically better outcomes, but do you have a source? From the data i've seen, you have this baskwards and that public schools do statistically have worse outcomes.
>. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code.
Again, this is not actually true if you spend time looking at actual data. Most school districts are funded by the state our county, and often the budgets are higher low income areas.
>If you’re curious about wealth impact on public schooling quality, see table 1 for a clear breakdown.
We weren't talking about wealth of households, we were talking about the amount of funding that goes into poorer areas vs richer areas.
I'm not sure you actually understand the charts you're sharing. What you linked shows an expected correlation between student performance (as well as teacher quality, both of which are combined to give schools an A+ score), and being in an area with more expensive homes.
> By almost any objective metric, there is something wrong with the school system,
In a free market, how do you signal that you want a higher-quality product? Buehler? Buehler?
Frankly, given the top-down constraints, and the amazingly low budget, its pretty damn amazing they are doing so well.
I'm transitioning to teaching from programming on wall street. I expect my first year's salary as a teacher to be less than half of what my annual bonus was.
You can't solve every problem by throwing money at it---but you can't solve every problem by NOT throwing money at it either :-)
Yeah, well, how come schools which get more money do better than schools who don't?
The U.S. spends more money per patient than almost any other country too. 3x what Canada spends. I guess you would be a big fan of a Canadian-style health care system?
>ow come schools which get more money do better than schools who don't?
They don't, that's my whole point. California funnels more money to low income areas than it does to higher income areas. They have more financial resources.
What is shocking, is that random parents with no teaching background can usually deliver a child through a k-12 curriculum with superior outcomes vs. the average public school.
That, alone, is a stinging indictment of public education.
And, usually spending about the total daily time required for just the assigned homework from a public school.
> random parents with no teaching background can usually deliver a child through a k-12 curriculum with superior outcomes vs. the average public school.
This is not what actually happens. For example, the parents who actually do this are not random.
I mean… yeah, if it was my full time job to educate my one child at home, then yeah, I feel pretty good about my chances of making that work - but also having that kind of time, and money, and energy to commit to a task like that is just… I mean, who can afford that, practically speaking? That’s a 13 year unpaid commitment that you have no training for or skills in, and the stakes are the success of your child. Are you prepared for all that?
I guess my point being - it’s not ‘random parents’ in your example, it’s parents that are already in a position to be able to and to be willing to deliver a child though a k-12 curriculum with superior outcomes.
> The most common reason cited for homeschooling (before the pandemic) was concern about the local school environment,
I would guess the sample is spoiled because one doesn’t tend to homeschool if your public school is adequate.
Still, even if you ignore that, outcomes are far less impressive than you’re making them sound.
> children in “unstructured” homeschool environments without organized lesson plans tend to score lower than children in conventional schools.
So this unschooling thing qualifies as unstructured which means worse scores than conventional schools.
But that’s just test scores.
Overall outcomes are not super impressive.
> In addition, most studies have found no difference between homeschooled and conventional students in college graduation rates. However, most homeschooled students do not attend competitive four-year colleges and one study found that homeschooled students may have lower math GPAs in college than children from conventional schools. Children who are homeschooled may also be more likely to work in a lower-paying job.
So to sum up, homeschooled kids might test better, unless they are “unschooled,” and they’ll probably have a lower paying job.
And I find this terribly unimpressive for having a far better student teacher ratio than public school.
I spent a month in a co-living community in some village in Austria. They were a diverse group of professionals from a variety of backgrounds (programmers, architect, doctor). They often ate meals together in the community kitchen and we would work in the garden together. I thought before arriving it was a hippy commune but it definitely wasn't. I had a lovely time.
Anyways one family with three children were doing this unschooling thing and the kids seemed well-socialized and explored their own interests. The oldest daughter went to Vienna a lot to take acting classes or something.
I thought it was a fine idea but that it took a lot of resources - one parent was always home and because of the community it was like the kids were being raised by the whole village. There were other kids to hang out with and plenty of space to do stuff. It seemed like you'd need a certain degree of wealth and structure to make it work.
In suburban America, I think it'd be a lot more challenging. The only American homeschoolers I've met were well-off Christians (again, wealth + community).
I’m not impressed (or even tolerant) of unschooling without seeing how their uneducation is practically stacking up with their traditional peers. I was homeschooled for part of my education, and even with wealth, it’s easy to miss critical foundations and unschooled kids sound ripe for it. I had to work very hard in some areas to catch up with or surpass my peers, and I think many wouldn’t have the patience to do it. Especially in areas known for permanently losing students like mathematics.
The germ of truth in the wacky conspiracy theory is that public school teachers have had to stop using a lot of these bottom-up, self-directed techniques, which let the children control how fast the material is presented, and the order in which the material is learned.
Even though these kinds of techniques have been shown to be highly effective, it's just too risky for public school teachers to use them anymore. The teacher is so encumbered by top-down standards that they simply cannot let the students pick the pace or order, bottom up. The pace must be set by the teacher top-down, it must be the same pace for every student--and it has to be a pretty fast pace to fulfill all the top-down standards requirements.
Public school kids would benefit from more bottom-up, rather than top-down learning experiences. But public school teachers are evaluated on how well their students fill in those bubbles on standard exams. Home schooling parents just don't have this kind of accountability.
The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect: Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.
> The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect
The problem is that when you don’t hold students accountable you end up in a situation where China outcompetes the United States in education and pulls ahead economically. China actually does have strict standards and they aren’t worried about hurting some feelings when a kid fails a math test.
You could make the argument quantitative measurements aren’t important in social sciences and gender studies, but fields like physics, engineering, and math they are extremely important and aren’t forgiving when people try to take shortcuts.
> aren’t important in social sciences and gender studies
Your education has failed to properly educate you about social science and gender studies :-) I think you should be held accountable! :-)
I was actually compiling about a lack of accountability. Home school teachers are not held as accountable as public school teachers.
For better or for worse. Having more discretion allows home school teachers to use some very effective, bottom up techniques, which work very well for some children. By the same token, if it is not working for their children, nobody holds them accountable.
> Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.
Standardization isn't a bad thing. If there are no standards, then how could the state identify poor educational outcomes and fix them? If there's no way of identifying them, what's incentivizing schools and teachers to do a good job?
I get that a lot of people (teachers especially) aren't fond of standardized testing, but the alternative sounds like an administrative clusterfuck
Well, having no money isn't the same thing as not having a yacht, either, but the one can impose substantial constraints upon the feasibility of the other.
It's hard to get across in a drive-by comment, but most of the advantages IMHO of alternative schooling methods are locked up behind increased parent engagement.
You need standardised testing and close teacher evaluations etc if your operating model for learning is that you turn your child over to the school system and that system is then responsible for the complete education and safety of the child with minimal parental oversight or engagement. If you are passing on responsibility completely to the state then yes, the state needs "industrial tools" to be able to manage this at scale.
With the closer involvement of parents and their acceptance of some responsibility for outcomes then a wide variety of more humane and personalised approaches to learning are possible.
IMHO, 80% of the problems with public schools would go away if they were not funded from property taxes, but paid by the state out of its general budget. If the rich parents knew their kids would get the same education as poor kids, you bet average educational achievement would skyrocket.
And the other 80% of the problems would go away if parents spent 2 hours a day on their kids education.
I feel like actually getting rich people to behave in ways that benefit the general public is a lot less straightforward
Suppose schools get funded like that. There's several other ways that the rich could ensure that their kids get a better outcome while still maintaining the relative advantage
Well thanks for this comment, because it makes a good point. Holding teachers accountable? Sure. Holding parents accountable??
A lot of parents would like to do more, but these days, if you want to afford a house which has a bedroom for the kid, both parents have to be working. In the Bay Area, it's not even enough for both parents to be working--both parents have to be killing it very stressful jobs which require very long hours.
It's so much easier to convert the guilt about bad parenting into anger at Teachers. Especially if you are continually worried about being laid off, while teachers have tenure. Especially if you have only 2 weeks vacation a year while the teachers get summer break. Especially if your employer is making unreasonable demands, while teachers have a strong union to advocate for them.
Good standards are good. Bad standards are bad. The current standards are more towards the good end of the spectrum, at least IMHO.
But they do have the side effect of keeping public school teachers from using bottom-up, student-directed techniques. The kids and the teacher are going to be evaluated by the standards, so the lessons have to be top down and at a very fast pace, or there would be no time to teach what the standards require.
Maybe a net win, maybe not, but we should at least be aware there are trade offs.
Personally I'm kind of skeptical of "bottom-up" anything. People only bring it up in a negative sense whenever they're criticizing some "top-down" system but the alternative is never well defined
Standardized testing came out of Bush junior which in turn came out of education reports in Regaen's time that US education sucked. That is, we've played this game with huge emphasis with and without. We can't whine all the time.
The goal of standardized testing was to measure then enforce accountability, which is the right thing to do. Underperformance would be met with no/reduced federal funding. It was also intended to push back against too local too state control in an attempt to root our lagards. The fed level had no other way to influence local decision making except with cash.
Others have written that bad schools is a particularly American problem. The US is average or so with respect to OECD countries especially given the huge variations in student background. The UK is not acing us for example.
Now there is one aspect of it's only the US that is true. And it's self imposed.
First, education has been made too political. Second, education is awash in American daydreaming of idealism; it's a proxy for arguing about larger issues in American society by trying to fix them earlier. Part of that idealism which is a inherently American sentiment my child has some greater purpose, talent, destiny that beurceatric teachers will screw up. So only if one finds and nutures it then ... fill in the blank with more guessing ... cause it's not like kids know any better.
Third, it's gotten caught up in culture wars all which are a huge waste of energy. We did that to ourselves. That's why it's covered and yacked about so much.
We adults ought to fix our adult problems in our context and get kids ready for same.
As others have noted unschooling has a nasty tinge of too much money, too much time on their hands with too many opinions. That leads to weird roll-your-own for those that afford it.
I'm American and raised two boys here one now through university.
I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school.
One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going?
We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35!
Quick math:
An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?
do it like every other business. double it. that leaves you with 1/2 a million profit per classroom, per year. ripe for disruption!
but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher.
and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional.
and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple.
in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and...
we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money.
what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.
1) The local school board is not in charge. I've dealt with school finance. The amount of regulation from feds and state and county and city (non-school) can be huge.
This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools.
I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure.
Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking.
When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class.
What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done.
I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it.
The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome.
Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back.
Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.
A classroom size of 35 isn't the same as an instructor ratio of 1:35. Gym teachers, art teachers, librarians, counselors and tons of other support staff that directly deal with students all day all need to get paid. This study shows that most schools in the bay area seem to have a ratio of 1:20 for certificated staff to students. https://sfeducation.substack.com/p/salaries-staffing-and-sch...
The school district also accommodates incredibly high need children that may have staff ratios higher than 1:1. A deaf student may have a trained interpreter that is assigned specifically to them. Autistic students, kids with down syndrome, etc... are all entitled to a public education.
Just because YOUR kid doesn't cost $24k per year to educate doesn't mean that some kids don't consume multiples of that number through no fault of their own.
More cynically, I suspect that a lot of it gets siphoned away by spending that has no actual impact on students. Things like bloated admin, badly managed contractors, dumb tech contracts
It's simple pipework logic: pressure is higher upstream. This is true in education (25% for management alone at SFUSD [1],) health care (15-30% administrative overhead [2],) retail (25-50% retail margin) and company management (sky's the limit.) The higher the pressure, the likelier the leaks.
I was homeschooled from K-6th, and unschooled from 7th-12th, circa 90s-2000s. I have thoughts.
I wound up fine, by which I mean I managed to get a B.S. and M.S, and have a good-paying job. IME, this is in no way the norm for either group. To be fair, my upbringing was also conservative Christian (but in a weird way, like my mom encouraged me to do a comparative religion study in high school), so many of my peers were on the "college is useless and indoctrinates you" track.
I was able to do a lot of self-directed learning, which in retrospect was useful. For example, I showed a strong interest in computers since I was about six years old. As such, I was encouraged to explore them, had books purchased for me on the subject, etc. As a counterpoint, before unschooling, I was forced to learn Latin and Greek roots. I hated it at the time, but these have proven to be remarkably useful in life – turns out a stunning amount of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so you can figure out much of a word's meaning from them. I think there are some things that kids are unlikely to be interested in, but just like being forced to eat a balanced diet, are still the right choice.
My wife is a Montessori teacher, and I think it's the best middle ground. Kids are encouraged to learn what they're interested in at a time that they're interested in it, and a love for learning for the sake of learning is encouraged. At the same time, if a kid stubbornly refuses to learn anything, eventually they will be forced to go through lessons, because at some point, you have to have a baseline level of education.
I was effectively hard-unschooled during my teenage years. I can't really complain about the experience. Most of my time was spent playing video games, reading, or debating people online in forums. I got my GED when I was seventeen and went to college. I had strange ideas about what college was (namely, I thought the PR copy universities provided was the "real thing" and was sorely disappointed to discover what amounted to an adult half-way house for professional employment rather than an actual place of learning).
In retrospect and purely on educational and financial grounds, I regret attending college, as I could've obtained the same information by paying for a community borrower's pass from the library to the same effect but without the pedigree.
My parents didn't do it for any ideological purpose; we simply lived in a bad area and they couldn't afford the tuition the Catholic schools were charging. My other siblings were sent to the local public high school, which was (and sadly remains) the worst in the state. Their life outcomes were much worse than my own.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadWhen groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed -- then I'm less worried.
Demanding mental assent to questionable claims to avoid punishment, regardless of questions about the predictive failure or successful outcomes of testing the hypotheses underlying those claims seems ... culty.
And, there's a lot of that in modern public schooling.
The first thing I ask my daughter whenever someone tells her to believe something, is "how could you know?". Quite often, the claimant has assiduously avoided informing her about how they "know" their claim is true. It's astonishing.
This is... sadly contrarian, and really makes no logical sense.
Sounds to me you are worried that these "groups" won't let you indoctrinate innocents into your own cult.
- Political fear-mongering set up by pro-privatization groups that want to profit off of
- The fact that schooling is difficult. Middle school and high school are challenging ages and no school can make the experience go perfectly.
- Anti-institution ideology spread through social media. I think a lot of groups online feel empowered to find alternatives and spread the word even if they are not statistically better outcomes.
Obviously the public school system isn’t perfect. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Not all districts are doing so well. But for the most part, engaged and supportive parents of kids in an average school system results in good outcomes.
Un-schooling isn’t the answer. It’s the Un-answer.
By almost any objective metric, there is something wrong with the school system, and the fact that this isn't something people admit is probably a reason there is a lot of pushback against it. People in support of the public school system aren't even willing to educate themselves on its failures and weaknesses.
>even if they are not statistically better outcomes.
So here once again you're saying there are not statistically better outcomes, but do you have a source? From the data i've seen, you have this baskwards and that public schools do statistically have worse outcomes.
>. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code.
Again, this is not actually true if you spend time looking at actual data. Most school districts are funded by the state our county, and often the budgets are higher low income areas.
It seems like zip code is a good indicator of public education quality, though. Here’s an actual source if you’d like to read about it: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019...
If you’re curious about wealth impact on public schooling quality, see table 1 for a clear breakdown.
We weren't talking about wealth of households, we were talking about the amount of funding that goes into poorer areas vs richer areas.
I'm not sure you actually understand the charts you're sharing. What you linked shows an expected correlation between student performance (as well as teacher quality, both of which are combined to give schools an A+ score), and being in an area with more expensive homes.
he asserted the null hypothesis. as a random nobody on the sidelines, I expect you to provide the evidence here.
Weird to give me criticism for that when literally nobody else has any sources in the whole thread.
In a free market, how do you signal that you want a higher-quality product? Buehler? Buehler?
Frankly, given the top-down constraints, and the amazingly low budget, its pretty damn amazing they are doing so well.
I'm transitioning to teaching from programming on wall street. I expect my first year's salary as a teacher to be less than half of what my annual bonus was.
You can't solve every problem by throwing money at it---but you can't solve every problem by NOT throwing money at it either :-)
The US spends more per student than almost any other country. "low budget" is just a lie folks tell gullible people.
The U.S. spends more money per patient than almost any other country too. 3x what Canada spends. I guess you would be a big fan of a Canadian-style health care system?
They don't, that's my whole point. California funnels more money to low income areas than it does to higher income areas. They have more financial resources.
That, alone, is a stinging indictment of public education.
And, usually spending about the total daily time required for just the assigned homework from a public school.
This is not what actually happens. For example, the parents who actually do this are not random.
I guess my point being - it’s not ‘random parents’ in your example, it’s parents that are already in a position to be able to and to be willing to deliver a child though a k-12 curriculum with superior outcomes.
> The most common reason cited for homeschooling (before the pandemic) was concern about the local school environment,
I would guess the sample is spoiled because one doesn’t tend to homeschool if your public school is adequate.
Still, even if you ignore that, outcomes are far less impressive than you’re making them sound.
> children in “unstructured” homeschool environments without organized lesson plans tend to score lower than children in conventional schools.
So this unschooling thing qualifies as unstructured which means worse scores than conventional schools.
But that’s just test scores.
Overall outcomes are not super impressive.
> In addition, most studies have found no difference between homeschooled and conventional students in college graduation rates. However, most homeschooled students do not attend competitive four-year colleges and one study found that homeschooled students may have lower math GPAs in college than children from conventional schools. Children who are homeschooled may also be more likely to work in a lower-paying job.
So to sum up, homeschooled kids might test better, unless they are “unschooled,” and they’ll probably have a lower paying job.
And I find this terribly unimpressive for having a far better student teacher ratio than public school.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator...
Anyways one family with three children were doing this unschooling thing and the kids seemed well-socialized and explored their own interests. The oldest daughter went to Vienna a lot to take acting classes or something.
I thought it was a fine idea but that it took a lot of resources - one parent was always home and because of the community it was like the kids were being raised by the whole village. There were other kids to hang out with and plenty of space to do stuff. It seemed like you'd need a certain degree of wealth and structure to make it work.
In suburban America, I think it'd be a lot more challenging. The only American homeschoolers I've met were well-off Christians (again, wealth + community).
Even though these kinds of techniques have been shown to be highly effective, it's just too risky for public school teachers to use them anymore. The teacher is so encumbered by top-down standards that they simply cannot let the students pick the pace or order, bottom up. The pace must be set by the teacher top-down, it must be the same pace for every student--and it has to be a pretty fast pace to fulfill all the top-down standards requirements.
Public school kids would benefit from more bottom-up, rather than top-down learning experiences. But public school teachers are evaluated on how well their students fill in those bubbles on standard exams. Home schooling parents just don't have this kind of accountability.
The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect: Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.
The problem is that when you don’t hold students accountable you end up in a situation where China outcompetes the United States in education and pulls ahead economically. China actually does have strict standards and they aren’t worried about hurting some feelings when a kid fails a math test.
You could make the argument quantitative measurements aren’t important in social sciences and gender studies, but fields like physics, engineering, and math they are extremely important and aren’t forgiving when people try to take shortcuts.
Your education has failed to properly educate you about social science and gender studies :-) I think you should be held accountable! :-)
I was actually compiling about a lack of accountability. Home school teachers are not held as accountable as public school teachers.
For better or for worse. Having more discretion allows home school teachers to use some very effective, bottom up techniques, which work very well for some children. By the same token, if it is not working for their children, nobody holds them accountable.
Standardization isn't a bad thing. If there are no standards, then how could the state identify poor educational outcomes and fix them? If there's no way of identifying them, what's incentivizing schools and teachers to do a good job?
I get that a lot of people (teachers especially) aren't fond of standardized testing, but the alternative sounds like an administrative clusterfuck
You need standardised testing and close teacher evaluations etc if your operating model for learning is that you turn your child over to the school system and that system is then responsible for the complete education and safety of the child with minimal parental oversight or engagement. If you are passing on responsibility completely to the state then yes, the state needs "industrial tools" to be able to manage this at scale.
With the closer involvement of parents and their acceptance of some responsibility for outcomes then a wide variety of more humane and personalised approaches to learning are possible.
And the other 80% of the problems would go away if parents spent 2 hours a day on their kids education.
Suppose schools get funded like that. There's several other ways that the rich could ensure that their kids get a better outcome while still maintaining the relative advantage
A lot of parents would like to do more, but these days, if you want to afford a house which has a bedroom for the kid, both parents have to be working. In the Bay Area, it's not even enough for both parents to be working--both parents have to be killing it very stressful jobs which require very long hours.
It's so much easier to convert the guilt about bad parenting into anger at Teachers. Especially if you are continually worried about being laid off, while teachers have tenure. Especially if you have only 2 weeks vacation a year while the teachers get summer break. Especially if your employer is making unreasonable demands, while teachers have a strong union to advocate for them.
But they do have the side effect of keeping public school teachers from using bottom-up, student-directed techniques. The kids and the teacher are going to be evaluated by the standards, so the lessons have to be top down and at a very fast pace, or there would be no time to teach what the standards require.
Maybe a net win, maybe not, but we should at least be aware there are trade offs.
Personally I'm kind of skeptical of "bottom-up" anything. People only bring it up in a negative sense whenever they're criticizing some "top-down" system but the alternative is never well defined
The goal of standardized testing was to measure then enforce accountability, which is the right thing to do. Underperformance would be met with no/reduced federal funding. It was also intended to push back against too local too state control in an attempt to root our lagards. The fed level had no other way to influence local decision making except with cash.
Others have written that bad schools is a particularly American problem. The US is average or so with respect to OECD countries especially given the huge variations in student background. The UK is not acing us for example.
Now there is one aspect of it's only the US that is true. And it's self imposed.
First, education has been made too political. Second, education is awash in American daydreaming of idealism; it's a proxy for arguing about larger issues in American society by trying to fix them earlier. Part of that idealism which is a inherently American sentiment my child has some greater purpose, talent, destiny that beurceatric teachers will screw up. So only if one finds and nutures it then ... fill in the blank with more guessing ... cause it's not like kids know any better.
Third, it's gotten caught up in culture wars all which are a huge waste of energy. We did that to ourselves. That's why it's covered and yacked about so much.
We adults ought to fix our adult problems in our context and get kids ready for same.
As others have noted unschooling has a nasty tinge of too much money, too much time on their hands with too many opinions. That leads to weird roll-your-own for those that afford it.
I'm American and raised two boys here one now through university.
One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going?
We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35!
Quick math:
An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?
but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher.
and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional.
and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple.
in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and...
we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money.
what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.
This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools.
I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure.
Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking.
When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class.
What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done.
I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it.
The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome.
Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back.
Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.
The school district also accommodates incredibly high need children that may have staff ratios higher than 1:1. A deaf student may have a trained interpreter that is assigned specifically to them. Autistic students, kids with down syndrome, etc... are all entitled to a public education.
Just because YOUR kid doesn't cost $24k per year to educate doesn't mean that some kids don't consume multiples of that number through no fault of their own.
More cynically, I suspect that a lot of it gets siphoned away by spending that has no actual impact on students. Things like bloated admin, badly managed contractors, dumb tech contracts
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/01/10/san-francisco-schools-sfus...
[2] https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20220909.830296/
I wound up fine, by which I mean I managed to get a B.S. and M.S, and have a good-paying job. IME, this is in no way the norm for either group. To be fair, my upbringing was also conservative Christian (but in a weird way, like my mom encouraged me to do a comparative religion study in high school), so many of my peers were on the "college is useless and indoctrinates you" track.
I was able to do a lot of self-directed learning, which in retrospect was useful. For example, I showed a strong interest in computers since I was about six years old. As such, I was encouraged to explore them, had books purchased for me on the subject, etc. As a counterpoint, before unschooling, I was forced to learn Latin and Greek roots. I hated it at the time, but these have proven to be remarkably useful in life – turns out a stunning amount of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so you can figure out much of a word's meaning from them. I think there are some things that kids are unlikely to be interested in, but just like being forced to eat a balanced diet, are still the right choice.
My wife is a Montessori teacher, and I think it's the best middle ground. Kids are encouraged to learn what they're interested in at a time that they're interested in it, and a love for learning for the sake of learning is encouraged. At the same time, if a kid stubbornly refuses to learn anything, eventually they will be forced to go through lessons, because at some point, you have to have a baseline level of education.
In retrospect and purely on educational and financial grounds, I regret attending college, as I could've obtained the same information by paying for a community borrower's pass from the library to the same effect but without the pedigree.
My parents didn't do it for any ideological purpose; we simply lived in a bad area and they couldn't afford the tuition the Catholic schools were charging. My other siblings were sent to the local public high school, which was (and sadly remains) the worst in the state. Their life outcomes were much worse than my own.