From the article:
Tom Carroll, who founded the Brighter Choice Foundation -- which supports all of the city's 11 charter schools -- is on the board of School Performance Inc., according to the most recent public records available. Chris Bender, executive director of Brighter Choice, has also served on the School Performance board . . . Bender, who was compensated $217,000 in 2009, lives in Loudonville and Carroll, who earned $328,000 in 2009, lives in Clifton Park.
Compensated by Brighter Choice and School Performance? If so, Christ what assholes, and what a scam.
Privatize profit socialize risk
Thinking thinking how did peaceful prosperous stable Tokugawa Japan keep its 2 million educated dynamic samurai out of commerce for two centuries? By guaranteeing them a permanent living income, making them all live in Edo, and banning them from Osaka and Kyoto...never mind.
Keep public salaries low, and don't tax them; and tax the hell out of private income and wealth to equalize. But how do we increase social status of public officials?
Hey, I'm trying to be reasonable, and compromise with the mixed economy. My preference is putting all the comrades in Mao jackets & caps.
I look terrible in caps. Is there an actual argument against making teaching a high status, highly paid profession? Dont we have a surplus of academics? (Sorry, guys. )
It's kind of a historic principle to provide public servants with security and status, but not wealth, to keep corruption and opportunism out. Anybody making six figures in a gov't job is the type to want seven figures after a while.
Except then they figure out how to use that status to accumulate wealth as soon as they leave their gov't job, i.e., the evil revolving door of lobbyists / aides / congressmen. Isnt that worse? At least if you actual pay them and only have to look for financial evidence of corruption you can do soemthing abt it when it comes up. The gov't officials becoming lobbyists for the industry they were just regulating and back again seems to invite a sort of corruption that's much more difficult to root out, let alone prosecute. There's always going to be a corruptible element that will chase the money (I worry less abt the ones who chase power). Might as well keep your enemies closer, etc.
I LOOK GREAT IN (ALL) CAPS!
making teaching a high status, highly paid profession? Dont we have a surplus of academics?
Surplus labor depresses wages.
Is there an actual argument against making teaching a high status, highly paid profession?
High status is all well and good, but finding money in local budgets for highly paid is where you run into problems. The argument, as always, is that people don't want to pay taxes.
I have conclusively proven that people would rather talk about rape than about charter schools.
10: And people wonder why I follow the ZooBorns RSS feed of baby animals.
10: Depends on the rape, I guess.
We applied our kid to 8 charter school kindergarten's next year, and he didn't win the lottery for any of them.
There is one school that sent a response saying we were in the category of "not likely" to get off the waiting list. But then there has been a lawsuit, because apparently people on the Upper West Side don't want the "Success Academy" to be located in the old high-school building that it had been designated for. So apparently people have been bailing from that charter school, because we just got a call that our son's status has been upgraded from "not-likely" to "likely".
If you're on the UWS, why charter schools particularly? Aren't the local elementary schools basically fine?
We aren't on the UWS. That school was just one of the many we applied to throughout the city, because our kid was put on the waiting list for our local school in Long Island City. It would have sucked to schlep our kid to the UWS every day, but, as it happens, there are very few charter schools in Queens.
Fortunately, we made it off the waiting list for our local school, so we won't have to go the charter route, but we were very much freaking out for a few weeks there.
And I gotta wonder how much "it will attract kids from Queens" is behind the UWS people's reasoning for suing to keep the charter school from opening there, so in a way I take this as a personal affront.
I get you. Yeah, I hate the complexity of the system -- that 'getting put on the waiting list' for the local public school, as opposed to having a seat waiting for you, is even a possibility is horrendous.
Yeah, I found the whole "lets encourage lots of young families to move to this newly developed area, but not provide them appropriate school capacity for years to come" thing to be rather weird.
I talk up my happy experiences with the NYC public schools to make it clear that it's possible to send your kids to good public schools in a part of an inner city that's not an UMC enclave (and a school that's not an UMC enclave within its neighborhood) but I should remember not to discount the hugely messed-up areas of the system.
Weird. I've never heard of such a thing. What are you supposed to do if the school year starts and you're still on the waiting list for your public school?
21: Everyone gets in somewhere -- you sort of show up at the school with your kid and hang around the office and they make phone calls, and by the end of the week you're someplace. And mostly people get settled before school starts.
OT: This is pretty hilarious:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJNCazmNnI
Everyone gets in somewhere
We have a similar system here, and as far as I know it's always sorted out before school starts, but the solution is often that the local schools are full so you have a 90 minute bus ride (each way) across town for elementary kids, which is so far beyond insane it makes me want to rip someone's kidneys out.
23: That would make me want to murder somebody a little bit.
When I am dictator of the world the school system will work like this: you will go to the school nearest where you live. Any attempt by the middle-classes to weasel out of this will be dealt with via harsh punitive measures. There will be no waiting lists or lotteries. Also, while I'm at it, no schools will have charitable status, so if you want to run a private school or religious school, fine, but no state money will go to it and we'll tax fuck out of you.
Oh my god. This whole subject is crazy-making. I had no idea that things were so screwy for going to your local public school.
27: Unless you figure out how to end residential segregation first, in the U.S. that would move things back to 1950 in much of the country.
It mostly doesn't come down to the first week of school, and there are some excuses -- people move, new neighborhoods get fashionable among different demographics, and suddenly you've got an indigestible spike in the number of kindergarteners expecting to attend your neighborhood school. And it's probably worse in cities than suburbs because people are more mobile.
But it gets better and worse depending on how well the school system is funded and run -- it shouldn't be a problem for more than a very few kids every year.
29: there will be no discrimination: black and white will be crushed to equal degrees of wretchedness by the iron boot of nattarGcMism.
Residential segregation would be less of a problem if the schools were all equally funded (ie by central rather than local government) and equally well run.
There's also a fair amount of district-line gerrymandering to keep the poor kids out of the nice schools -- a hardline "attend the closest schools" rule might be less segregated than we've got now.
33 gets it right. None of that property tax funding bullshit. Schools in economically depressed areas would get more, not less money, and academically gifted and/or middle class kids wouldn't get siphoned off by schools in economically advantaged areas.
black and white will be crushed to equal degrees of wretchedness by the iron boot of nattarGcMism.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot savate stamping on a human face -- forever.
There's also a fair amount of district-line gerrymandering to keep the poor kids out of the nice schools
This is wrong.
Not so much stamping, more a sort of balletic enlyrca'd flick. Not camp at all, oh no.
33, 35: You still haven't explained how to get from here to where you want to be. Most of the economically depressed areas have been left by the white middle class and then black middle class. You could fund the schools all you want, but unless you close some schools or let kids go to school far from their house or move people, you're still stuck with schools where the average freshman will drop out.
re: 39
Why will the average freshman drop out? Seriously? I grew up in an economically depressed area. Most people didn't drop out of school.
Anyway, I'm not advancing some concrete detailed plan, I just think we should make strenuous efforts to stop all the people who might potentially make a school a nicer place to be from fucking off elsewhere. You have much stronger incentives to improve a school if you know your kids are going there.
40: The problem is that the people who want to fuck off are the best able to move and geographically sort themselves. Much of the history of trying to improve educational opportunities for the poor and minority students in the United States has been focused on not requiring kids to go to the school closest to their house. Expanding districts helps, but this was put the an empirical test and in most of the country the answer was that middle class people can drive farther to work than federal court systems are willing to bus school kids.
Residential segregation would be less of a problem if the schools were all equally funded (ie by central rather than local government) and equally well run.
Would you like your pony now or with dessert?
37: I'm thinking of this sort of thing.
re: 42
A lot of Americans seem to have this response, but lots of countries manage quite well. It helps not to treat a very specific system as if it's somehow inevitable.
re: 41
Yes, and the response in other countries has been different. England, particularly recently, has become much more like the US model, so much the worse for England. Scotland, historically, has been much closer to my model.
42: New money doesn't even know when to serve the pony.
Previous conversations on this topic have all ended somewhat badly, fwiw. It's incommensurable value systems and different historical experiences, I expect.
and different historical experiences
This, mostly. We've got such an unpleasant history of failed desegregation and intransigently wildly varying school quality that it's hard not to look at any idea and reject as "Tried that, not going to work either."
And I'm usually the one with the pie-in-the-sky plan for fixing everything, but I understand why it all gets waved off by people being realistic.
As I've said before, letting the best (academically) poor students go elsewhere just leads to de-facto segregation by test-score, which I don't really see as an improvement.
49: "the (academically) best poor students" might be less ambiguous.
Would you like your pony now or with dessert?
Eating ponies before dessert is, like being a shit, typically French.
43: I meant wrong morally, not factually.
Look, I'm all for centralized funding of schools, despite the seeing impossibility of same, it's universally equal quality of schools that's impossible by definition. As Moby indicates, people redistribute themselves to make heterogeneous student backgrounds unlikely, teachers often don't want to teach poor kids who are struggling with the material if they can help it. There are things you can do to ameliorate this, like paying good teachers who opt for struggling school populations more, but schools will never all be of equal quality so long as our society remains unequal.
49: So the poor, smart kid is supposed to give up the chance to have a large peer group in order that he or she can inspire the poor, disinterested kids who will I'm sure will do nothing at all to make life hard on the few kids who keep getting As and screwing up the grading curve.
53: You'd need to combine it with a better welfare state than we've got. My guess is that the working-class school ttaM went to had a population that, while they might have included the poorest people in Scotland, didn't include kids living as badly (untreated dental pain, insecure housing, whatever) as the poorest people in the US. That's the kind of thing that really screws up schools in poor areas.
55: Yeah, this too. Schools for poorer kids are also worse (in this country) because poorer parents tend to have less time, energy and comfort in dealing with bureaucarcies in order to hold administrations to account.
make life hard on the few kids who keep getting As and screwing up the grading curve.
Grading curves are, like segregation, not an inevitable part of a school system.
Giving a whole school a D- isn't really politically possible either. I speak from personal experience when I say that being the obvious counterexample to complaints of "Nobody can possibly understand this" is not a pleasant experience even when the teacher is wise enough to leave your name out of it.
53
schools will never all be of equal quality so long as our society remains unequal.
Well, sure, of course, obviously schools will never be 100.00 percent equal in quality. If you want to get them better on average than they are, though, getting away from funding schools at the local level will help a lot. I'd go so far as to say that dollar for dollar it would make the single biggest difference, not that that means it would be easiest to implement.
Vermont has a similar system, actually, as created by Acts 60 and 68: education funding over a level determined by formula goes into a statewide pool that is redistributed to schools with lower per-pupil spending of their own, I think. It's complicated, and I don't know how well it works, but it's an attempt at the basic goal. Not that Vermonters are real Americans, of course.
What with their communistic attempts at single payer health care. Gonna start calling them the Red Mountain State, I tell you.
I meant what I wrote above about incommensurable value systems. Different commitments to equality, different understanding of what egalitarianism entails and a different view of who can and should be helped.
Social and economic circumstances aren't a given. They are, in part, a consequence of legislative/distributive choices. Nothing anyone has said, through many heated debates, has convinced me that all and every feature of the given system need be inevitable. As it happens, i have a personal bugbear about the view that the only possible response to educational inequities is to cream off high academic achievers to be saved and leave the rest.
Any concrete policy position is obviously going to be tied into a wider commitment to, simplifying glibly, taking a lot more of rich people's shit.
My view here is aspirational.
Re 58
Relentless 'smart kid' self pity does not a political policy make. Smart successful adults who think that the less academically fortunate are undeserving of help because they were mean need to take a fucking good look at themselves.
62: I greatly enjoyed high school, it just took some time to figure out how to do well and not piss off everybody else. (Hint: This involves drinking, smoking, and not obviously studying.)
And I still say that looking at a social problem that has vexed people for a very long time and saying, "We won't help the kids we know how to help until we can help everybody" is effectively the same thing as saying, "I'm going to do as little as possible while waiting for the revolution." In the U.S. at least, you cannot hold academically gifted kids in a bad school (excepting some very rural areas) because other school will come and yank them away at the first chance. This is not without problems, but on the whole a good development. (And a very recent one, for minority students in much of the country.)
Last comment a bit harsh. Not to dismiss people's lived experience, but it's no basis for educational policy.
Stop being mean to the smart kid, ttaM.
so if you want to run a private school or religious school, fine
Fucking liberal. Why don't you just about join the SDP if that's your attitude? Paying money for education, like paying money for prostitution, should be dealt with via a short but meaningful prison sentence. Religious schools I would tolerate as long as a) they did not restrict admission on grounds of religion, or any other grounds and b) they did not provide any religious education whatever.
I would also follow the French policy on teachers - they don't get to choose which schools to work at, either. You sign up for a five year tour of duty at the Department of Education, then you go where you're sent.
On second thoughts 66 gets it right.
Religious schools I would tolerate as long as a) they did not restrict admission on grounds of religion, or any other grounds and b) they did not provide any religious education whatever.
Each school would be permitted to maintain one metal box, 30 cm on each side, in a non-public area, with one(1) religious or sacred object within, the box to remain closed at all times when students were on the premises.
they don't get to choose which schools to work at, either
Leaving aside the rest of it, trying to do this around here would have people making comparisons to Gov. Walker.
25 We have a similar system here, and as far as I know it's always sorted out before school starts
Not always. You should talk to my mom.
but the solution is often that the local schools are full so you have a 90 minute bus ride (each way) across town for elementary kids, which is so far beyond insane it makes me want to rip someone's kidneys out.
I haven't completely followed all the developments and the changes forced by various court decisions, but what's there is still some kind of semi-functional remnant of what was once, and maybe still is, one of the most well-integrated large school systems in the US, which wouldn't have been possible without busing over such large distances.
It's a mess, and it's not clear to me how the goal of having most classrooms contain a sizable fraction of both black and white students should be traded off against other goals. But all that complicated busing is achieving something.
68: There is some serious shadiness around the line between religious and charter schools:
Out went the private Liberty Christian Academy. In came the public Patriot Preparatory Academy, a charter school in the same location with many of the same students and teachers. The state [Ohio] says the new school has changed enough to receive tax money.
The reason I head about this place is that they tragically had 3 kids die recently in Costa Rica, during what has been alternately described as a "misson" and a "school trip."
I'm assuming that 66, 67 wouldn't have locally elected school boards either and the Central Committee will provide all of the oversight anyone would ever need.
I would generally endorse 63 and also note that I've read enough British sociology of education literature (OK, it was generally stuff from the Phil Cohen, Paul Willis era) to know that your schools aren't free of crab antics/social punishments for poor or black kids who have the audacity to be smart.
Social and economic circumstances aren't a given. They are, in part, a consequence of legislative/distributive choices.
Welcome to the United States, where our legislative choice of the moment (No Child Left Behind) has created intense incentives for schools to -- among many other things -- drag their feet, mislead, and outright refuse to enroll kids who they think will drive down their attendance, test score, and graduation numbers.
If you had told me 20 years ago that I would be spending part of my adult life calling lawyers to call another lawyer to tell a school principal that she may not refuse to enroll a six-year-old on the grounds that "leases aren't proof of residence," I would not have believed you.
If you had told me that schools in terribly poor neighborhoods, that are chaotic and violent, would nevertheless invest significant financial and human resources in attempting to bar students from enrolling, I would not have believed you.
At this point, if you told me that public schools were requiring copies of parents' K-12 transcripts before enrolling a child, I would believe you. The system is that poisoned.
Re 72
The UK isn't monolithic. There are three entirely different education systems in place. I'm from the Northern Socialist-Calvinist Satrapy. Dsquared is not.
73: This reminds me that one other thing that is kind-of shady about our kid finally getting off the waiting list for our local school is that it happened shortly after our kid tested into the district's GT program. Given the principal's reputation, its entirely possible that my kid was cherry-picked off the waiting list after his test scores came in.
Allegheny County (population 1.2 million) has 45 school districts, 11 public charter schools, and eleven private high schools (nearly all Catholic).
74: OK, but now I've no idea how I should interpret the lyrics to this song.
re: 77
And? There's a huge genre of people whining about their school days. Kids picking on people who are a bit different is the story of, well, kids. It's still not something to base an educational policy on.
re: 77
And I can be _pretty_ sure the people who wrote those lyrics [see Unfogged threads passim] have political views on education much closer to mine.
70 is right, and it's also an inevitable tradeoff in any city with badly segregated residential housing patterns. I don't know that there's an easy anser to that one.
OK, first, aside from 66, which, if it was meant seriously rather than as some long-way-round yanking of bob, sounds pretty damn Stalinist to me, I don't think your politics and mine are really any different on this point, just a) our sense of the situationally politically possible, and b) our assessment of how gifted and talented kids should be treated.
The bit I was thinking about from the song was this: "When will you realize that it never pays/ To be smarter than teachers/ Smarter than most boys?/ Shut your mouth, start kicking the football." That's not just whining about school yard woes, that's a social reality for many poor kids and kids of color (though not all, certainly) for whom being smart or getting good grades will be seen as a provocation, and for whom getting out of their neighborhood school might give them a chance to succeed with getting beaten up. That's something to take seriously when you're designing policy.
I think many of the 42, 44, 46, 47 ill communication comes down to the issue that the racist right in this country has always taken an extremist position on segregation, and the anti-racist left decided to abandon their extremism after the mid-1970s. So we have a situation where there's a very dedicated base of support for any idea that will increase racial and class segregation in the schools in the US, and only token resistance to that.
It really would take some kind of broader political revolution to change the direction that school policy is headed (and has been headed for the past 30-some years) in this country. Of course, just point me to the barricades, and I'll be right there with you killing whitey abolishing charter schools, but it's not going to be as simple as a getting a couple of ballot initiatives passed, or electing a few more Democrats.
Things are growing ever-more hellish here. I had to sit down today with an Important Person (who, to her credit, has never been anything but totally supportive of me), and mouth all these platitudes about what I thought I could do with my career over the next 20 or 30 years. But I think we'll be lucky just to get some kind of massive depression that gives us 30% unemployment and what-not. World ain't going to end on Saturday, but it might not be so far off either. Seems like it's hardly been born, but it's dying.
Goddammit! I closed that tag correctly! Or at least I meant to.
It's pretty elegant, for an html error. The sentence is arguably more profound as-is.
Re 81
Pontificating about poor kids and kids of colour cuts no ice. I _know_ what that is like. Telling me about the reality of being poor and smart in a Scottish school? You are taking the piss. I still don't think that stripping people like me out and away is how it ought to be done. Full stop. There are a million ways kids get bullied and zeroing in on the smart kids as if they are special is just bullshit. Kids get bullied for being poor and dumb, or for not wearing the right clothes or shoes with holes, or because they smell, or are gay, or a million other things. And singling out the smart and then getting sanctimonious about it is just special pleading.
The relentless us and them bullshit that saturates unfogged discussions of education in which those who don't excell within the context of standarised testing are essentially treated as the alien other to be feared, despised, and avoided is pretty unsavory. I don't think of people who didn't do well at school as other.
What about college? Do you think everyone should have to go to their local college? I can see the argument for making people go to their local school (though I think it wouldn't work in the US for the "hundreds of years of apartheid" reason), but surely at some point smart people need to be allowed to take interesting classes. Whether that happens at 12, 14, 16, or 18 seems a tricky judgement call.
I don't think of people who didn't do well at school as other.
This is a genuine question: Do you think that is because you have spent (continue to spend) more time meaningfully interacting with people who are not-school-smart kinds of smart?
One of the reasons I'm asking is that I often encounter, when speaking to US upper-middle-class audiences, a particular kind of class blind spot. For example, when asked to estimate the number of adults age 25 and over with a college degree, they often significantly overestimate it.
Now, there are several possible reasons for this -- two major ones being a mental tendency to conflate "some college" with having a degree, and the fact that the population in my state is older and therefore less likely to have grown up in a generation where college was more common. People in their 40s don't necessarily have accurate notions about the educational paths of people in their 70s.
But the more I encounter this, the more I think it is symptomatic of a kind of hypersegregation of the labor market. Careers are so specialized now that people have much less opportunity to meaningfully encounter -- i.e., more than just sharing an elevator with -- other people who do radically different kinds of jobs.
This has all kinds of implications, including in people who have "knowledge worker" jobs not seeing any particular cost in raising the retirement age, or not understanding how important paid sick time is.
Disclaimer: All of the above is basically just my amateur sociological theorizing, albeit having spent quite a lot of time thinking about how I can translate the stories I'm telling so that they are understandable for an audience with no direct experience of the issues.
but surely at some point smart people need to be allowed to take interesting classes. Whether that happens at 12, 14, 16, or 18 seems a tricky judgement call.
Can interesting classes only be offered at non-local schools?
88: I think that's part of what's going on with the Americans in the conversation that's annoying ttaM so much. Our schools seem to do really badly with a wide range of abilities in the classroom -- he got an education that sent him off perfectly reasonably prepared for university from an ordinary school in a depressed area, and that sounds seriously unrealistic to me in the US. I'd expect someone who came out of a non-magnet high school in a poor area in the US and went to a good college to be talking about the shocking difficulty of making up their academic deficits for the first year or two of college, because their classes had all been geared at a very low level for kids not expected to go any further.
I don't know why we do so much worse at managing ranges of ability here, but the assumption that not pulling out the academically stronger kids is going to be doing them a fair amount of damage later on is, I think, almost universal among the Americans, and ttaM doesn't seem to share it at all.
ttaM, I don't think anyone actually thinks "provide optimal opportunities for the cream of every locality" is a good core educational strategy - 54, 81, etc. are rather objecting to your idea of preventing people who want to from transferring, because it would be taken as deeply unfair to those people who need to do so based on their personal circumstances, and even a muscular progressive majority couldn't/wouldn't enact such a policy.
OTOH, I feel like some of the above comments have been implying that cohort/cultural/self-segregation/inequity problems (hereinafter cultural problems) are so serious that solving them is a necessary prerequisite to equalizing and enhancing education funding. If this is a misreading on my part, please say so, but I disagree - cultural problems are very complicated and pervasive, such that we really have little idea what to do about them in practice without curtailing freedoms in an unacceptable way, whereas we know funding disparities and inadequacies are so pervasive that correcting them will have huge returns, and indeed go a long way toward softening the impact of the cultural problems.
I would even say to 81.last that no, we can realistically move forward on the policy front without incorporating any solution targeted at to those "social realities," rather trusting that funding equity will greatly lessen those problems and also give local administrators the leeway to better address them in their own preferred ways.
Although I do have a lot of love for radial suburban-plus-urban district lines.
85: Ok, I don't think I was trying to tell you what your childhood was like (I've honestly no idea what you were trying to say in 74 at this point; there's a bunch of this where I suspect we've been talking past each other), but you are making a fuckload of assumptions about me. I grew up lower-middle class, but my parents were intellectuals, so personally I always had support, not to say steady pressure, to live up to my potential. Because I was in a school system with a G&T magnet track, I also had a community of other kids, some from the same class background as me, for support. Those poor kids and kids of color, who were told they were trying to be white, trying to be better than everyone, aren't something that I'm pontificating about, they were my friends. I also had and have friends who, for a variety of reasons, didn't do well in school. I didn't think of them as other and still don't. So you can get off your high horse right about now.
You used the venerable cream metaphor up above. I also don't think that the best performing students should get scraped off and those remaining left to rot, but neither do I think that homogenizing everything makes for a better all around educational experience. Smart kids who aren't being challenged often get bored, depressed and underachieve, and no one's ever explained to me how that helps the kids who aren't doing as well. Personally I spent my elementary school in and prefer the Open School model, but that only works if you have a culture that supports it, more staff and more varied resources available to students persuing different interests with different affinities.
As to bullying, yeah, kids get tortured for lots of dumbass reasons, and there has to be a broad cultural response to that from very young if we hope to shift anything. In the mean time, if there are specific dynamics or conditions that we can do something about, then we should do that rather than fatalistically throwing up our hands at the cruelty of children/youth. I don't know how it was in your (impoverished) community, but for plenty of folks I know it's both desperately important to have models of success for folks from your community and immensely difficult for individuals to persrvere and become those successes, in no small part because they are deemed weak and inauthentic for trying. I think to say that they have to tough out the cards their dealt, just cause, is bullshit. I suspect you think that things won't be better for them anywhere else (and of course they still have to go home) and that things will somehow be worse for the kids left behind, and I'm sure that somethimes all that's true, but sometimes it isn't. To say that no one gets any options is just dogma.
I'm glad that it seems like your experience as a smart poor kid in a local school was just fine, or at least one that didn't leave you wishing you had had some other option. I just know folks who very much feel like their life was saved by having some other way to go.
we know funding disparities and inadequacies are so pervasive that correcting them will have huge returns, and indeed go a long way toward softening the impact of the cultural problems
Do we know this? I think higher per pupil funding doesn't directly result in better outcomes, but I don't know how much equalizing funding while holding other factors constant effects things.
93: I don't know about research results; I wouldn't be surprised if returns are hard to detect when the increases are at the margin. I have a strong moral conviction, having seen teachers sell possessions to afford gas for the week, that what we need is the structural changes that come with making teaching a well-paid job.
90.last:
I'm all for moving forward on a policy level, and if we could equalize per pupil funding tomorrow, let's go ahead and do that yesterday. I just don't think that's the full picture/solution.
Also, I don't think that the distinction here is people who "excell within the context of standarised testing" it's people who think knowledge is worthwhile and enjoy reading.
I'm all for moving forward on a policy level, and if we could equalize per pupil funding tomorrow, let's go ahead and do that yesterday. I just don't think that's the full picture/solution.
I know what I'm saying seems ponyish, but I think the current national tendency, to argue over the best administrative and line-level means of teaching, enables the effective consensus that we don't need to change levels of funding, only how funding is used. Changing the conversation can, I think, help break us out of this stagnation, and it doesn't need to be 100%, or even 75%, equality to be a big improvement.
I'm all for moving forward on a policy level, and if we could equalize per pupil funding tomorrow, let's go ahead and do that yesterday. I just don't think that's the full picture/solution.
I know what I'm saying seems ponyish, but I think the current national tendency, to argue over the best administrative and line-level means of teaching, enables the effective consensus that we don't need to change levels of funding, only how funding is used. Changing the conversation can, I think, help break us out of this stagnation, and it doesn't need to be 100%, or even 75%, equality to be a big improvement.
No, I agree. A political culture in which adequate funding is derided as "throwing money at the problem" is a sick political culture indeed.
re: 92
re: 74 -- I was responding to you having read about the British education system. My point was that there isn't a British education system, there are three public systems in use, and the system I was educated in is very different from the system used in England, which is vastly more likely to be the one you'll have read about.
I'm not making any assumptions about you at all. I'm pissed off with what you wrote, I know fuck all about your personal circumstances. Anyway, these conversations never go anywhere. Hence incommensurable values. We have radically different views on what education should be doing and who it should be helping.
Whenever it's come up before it just goes round and round. Systems in which everyone goes to the same school are NOT systems in which everyone has to i) learn the same material, and ii) that material has to be boring and unchallenging for those who are academically able. 99% of US people seem unable to envisage a system in which this is the case. That is all.
I'm glad that it seems like your experience as a smart poor kid in a local school was just fine, or at least one that didn't leave you wishing you had had some other option. I just know folks who very much feel like their life was saved by having some other way to go.
this might be the most Emo pair of sentences ever written by someone of voting age.
re: 87
This is a genuine question: Do you think that is because you have spent (continue to spend) more time meaningfully interacting with people who are not-school-smart kinds of smart?
Possibly. Since I'm the only person in my entire extended family to have gone to university, I'd imagine that forms part of an explanation of why I don't think of university educated people as special or interesting, and the uneducated as objects of pity and/or fear, in the way that some seem to. My drinking circle in England is about half people in skilled manual jobs, and half people like me [smart-arses from the Celtic/northern fringes]. So I'd expect I spend a lot more time interacting with morlocks than the average college educated US professional seems to, yeah. The howling prejudice that saturates these conversations here is a constant source of annoyance.
At core, though, my view is driven by ideology and politics as much as it is personal connectedness.
Do you think that is because you have spent (continue to spend) more time meaningfully interacting with people who are not-school-smart kinds of smart?
You see, this is why we need to bring back National Service. (partly joking) Two years in close proximity to long-service-sergeant type people who
a) didn't get any formal education past the age of 16
b) get to tell you what to do with absolute authority and c) are much better at your job than you are
would do a lot of good for social cohesion.
Systems in which everyone goes to the same school are NOT systems in which everyone has to i) learn the same material,
This.
If Trainspotting has taught us anything, it's that your best move as a Scottish teen is to get out of your neighborhood and find some new friends.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Upper Middle Class Americans are snobbish nutjobs about colleges and schools, and that overeducated Unfogged commenters are the worst. And yet, I spent part of the day trying to figure out the local public school lottery and get information on some private schools for the kid. Can't run away from yourself.
Berkeley High School is an odd case. Only high school in the district, huge range of course material (along with controversies about the "tracking" system used to sort students within the school), more integrated (at the aggregate level, at least) than the two junior high schools in the same district. At least as of the mid-90s, many people were apparently taking their kids out of private junior high schools and sending them to Berkeley High. I don't know what it's like there now.
Only thing I can see wrong with 27 is how to stop the middle classes from gaming the system.
And 66 should be enacted universally.
re: 106
Well on that, I think Michael Foot got it right:
We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is deprived of their initiative, I would answer 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do.
So yeah, we need to stop them gaming it, if we can. It's inevitable that they'll try to.
107 is a great quote. I sympathise with 66, but I'm not sure how you'd frame legislation to ban private academic tuition which didn't also ban hiring somebody to teach you the guitar. For example. Needs more work.
Well, we managed to frame the prostitution legislation so that it doesn't prevent you from hiring someone to dress you up as a baby and piss on you. I am not sure quite exactly what public policy interest was being protected there, but it shows what you can achieve if you put your mind to it.
I mean (to continue) nationalising Eton and Fettes wouldn't prevent private eductation. The very rich would simply do it at home and the middle class would do it in church halls. So you'd have to draft it very carefully. Also, what about legitimate home schoolers like Asilon? Do they sometimes hire specialist expertise? Should they be banged up for doing so?
106 -- Jesus, I know he lost bit that guy was the leader of one of the two major parties in Britain? A different country.
Well, we managed to frame the prostitution legislation so that it doesn't prevent you from hiring someone to dress you up as a baby and piss on you.
Education legislation framed on parallel principles wouldn't prevent you from hiring somebody to dress you up in early 19th century costume and teach you trigonometry.
Paying money for education, like paying money for prostitution, should be dealt with via a short but meaningful prison sentence.
This is, I think, wrong on both counts but I emphatically don't want to get into the second one.
Apart from anything else, making fee-paying education illegal in Britain would almost certainly lead to rapid growth in northern European English-language boarding schools. And if you want to discourage private education and improve state education, it makes more sense (and is less illiberal) to tax the hell out of one to fund the other. Sweden doesn't have fantastic state schools because it's made private schools illegal; it has fantastic state schools because they take education, especially primary education, seriously and fund it properly.
And where do you stop? Should private adult education also be illegal? If I as a responsible adult decide it might be fun or interesting or career-enhancing to learn Polish, and pay for a few lessons with a local Polish teacher, should we both be banged up - when if I'd decided instead to pay to learn savate, both my teacher and I would be in the clear?
One of the reasons I am dubious about concentrating overmuch on the experience of the higher percentiles of students is that I was one of those students, and had some pretty lousy experiences with the public school system because of it. NOT because the other crabs kept trying to pull me back into the bucket. Quite the contrary, of all the things I was bullied over (being fat, and consequently no good at sports; being queer or queerish; not having the money or physique to dress in the latest fashions; standard race-and-class differences) doing better at schoolwork barely even rated. I saw this with other people I was at school with as well, that just being good at standardized tests, or at sucking up to teachers, or always getting your homework done perfectly, really wasn't that big a deal from a bullying perspective, nor was it much of a guarantee of educational success. Challenged? I was challenged a lot in school, and for the most part, except for standardized tests, which I've always excelled at, I was hardly ever up to the challenge. Most schoolwork, in my experience, has very little to do with either imparting or measuring knowledge. Even pre-No Child Left Behind, it's usually about giving the education bureaucracy a convenient way to cover their collective asses from criticism that kids don't really learn much in school. Even if I had had a perfect academic career, I'm pretty doubtful that it would have made much difference in how much actual learning I got done. Most of that had to come from my parents, friends and own researches, not from school.
American schools have a pathological anti-book-smart culture, one that I guess must be peculiar to the US. The result of this culture is that it makes a bunch of smart teenagers feel incredibly alienated. This colors the discussion of public school policy. My personal experience was basically okay, and I would be fine with sending kids to public school, but my wife's experience was so miserable that the idea clearly fills her with anxiety.
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The reason I am up at 5 a.m., when I only went to sleep at midnight, is that I had a horrible, yet all-too-real nightmare about the financial situation at my new job. Thankfully, things are not as bad as the nightmare suggested, but we are really up against it for cash over the next couple of months. And the founder, whom I have to depend on for most of our revenue-generating activities, is an active hinderance most of the time. I've only been here 5 weeks, and it's already seeming kinda untenable. I really wish they'd been straight up with me right when I started that we were going into a severe cash crunch.
I guess I'm just doomed to face this kind of thing with every job. This is why I wanted to go back to the financial industry, but it seems I have really and truly burnt my bridges at my old employer. Fuck.
I don't know if it is more or less horrible because the amounts of money we're talking about are basically lunch to the dsquared/Halford end of the commentariat. Christ, why can't I have a Tariq Ali or someone like that on my board who can just write out a big check whenever things are tight?
Sigh.
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it makes more sense (and is less illiberal) to tax the hell out of one to fund the other.
You could start by removing the charitable status of private schools. It's insane that places which charge annual fees equivalent to a median annual income (ave. fees £23,000 for boarders according to the pedia thing) should get a tax break for their charity in doing so.
106 Only thing I can see wrong with 27 is how to stop the middle classes from gaming the system.
In the US, as I tried ineptly to point out above, one thing that one might think is wrong about "you will go to the school nearest where you live" is that you might have a city where one-fourth of the population is black, and local schools effectively mean that one-quarter of the schools end up being (nearly) all black and the rest (nearly) all white. You might think this is fine provided all the schools are equally funded, but given the long history of "separate but equal," I think it's understandable why for at least some people forcing classrooms to contain a mix of races is one desideratum for the school system. I realize this particular aspect of "local schools" might be unique to this country, but as far as I can tell it's orthogonal to all the things that make ttaM upset about the idea of not having local schools.
re: 119
I mentioned that above, yeah. It'd be nice to force university admissions processes to automatically knock some punitive percentage off the UCAS point score for private school attendees, too. It might not do much to make university entrance more equitable, but it'd make me laugh, anyway.
re: 120
You haven't really tried 'equal' though, because of the way your schools are funded. And it's not like there is some process going on where middle-class kids are being dropped into low-achieving schools because they have poor test scores. This isn't some process of streaming by academic ability, it's segregation by social class with a fig-leaf of integration added by giving some of the better performing kids from poor areas a lift out.
120: Although, to be fair, in a large part of the country the system we've got now isn't integrating the schools either.
My problem with the "everyone goes to the local school" is that it assumes roughly equal quality of the local schools, and while I accept that this is possible, in the US it's not a solved problem and sending people to their local schools only wouldn't make it one. I prefer "Everyone goes to the school of their choice, regardless of residence, overcrowded schools bounce excess students by lottery, also regardless of residence, the state spends a fair amount of money on getting people to the schools of their choice."
122: You haven't really tried 'equal' though, because of the way your schools are funded.
While the way our schools are funded generally, by local property taxes, is a sin and a shame, we still have problems with equalizing school quality where that's not the issue -- within the NYC school system there are much better and much worse schools, and they're all getting funded out of the same pot.
This gets attributed to things like middle-class parents watchdogging the management of their local schools, where poor parents don't, but I honestly don't understand why, other than malice, the schools in poor areas can't be run better regardless of parental involvement.
122 You haven't really tried 'equal' though, because of the way your schools are funded. And it's not like there is some process going on where middle-class kids are being dropped into low-achieving schools because they have poor test scores. This isn't some process of streaming by academic ability, it's segregation by social class with a fig-leaf of integration added by giving some of the better performing kids from poor areas a lift out.
No, see 70. I went to school in a county (including a medium-sized city and many of its suburbs) with one unified public school system, all operated out of one budget. There were magnet schools (including where I went to high school), but most of the system does involve precisely people from various parts of the city being "dropped in" to schools in other parts of the city without regard to their level of academic ability.
I'm not sure how widespread such systems are now, or to what extent they were a distinctively Southern response to the need to force integration.
This isn't some process of streaming by academic ability, it's segregation by social class
Are you suggesting this doesn't happen in England (don't know about Scotland)? I can show you two adjacent streets near ours which fall into different catchment areas and identical houses in the catchment of the "good" school are 15% dearer than those in the catchment of the "bad" school.
@124
One of my parents has taught in schools in low income (US) neighborhoods for some years, and based that I think that the importance of parental involvement is difficult to overestimate, and the lack of it is difficult for teachers to overcome.
In the end a teacher can't make anyone do their homework.
You might think this is fine provided all the schools are equally funded
If some of the schools are all-black (and presumably by that token majority low-income and with greater social problems), and some are all-white and overwhelmingly upper middle class, why would anyone think that they should be equally funded?
128: No, you're right, and I'm with ttaM in 35 in wanting more funding for the schools in lower-income areas, if students are going to their local schools.
re: 126
Oh no, but it happens less in Scotland than it does in much of England [but still happens], and it used to happen in England much less than it does now. I'm just in favour of policies that mitigate against it, I'm not saying we live in some socialist paradise or anything.
128 also has a point. Clearly the low-income school gets funded significantly more. Which would be as it is in other countries.
It'd be nice to force university admissions processes to automatically knock some punitive percentage off the UCAS point score for private school attendees, too
Again, this limp-wristed SDP stuff. New policy!
1. Admittance to the British University system to be determined entirely by A-level grades (plus interviews where necessary).
2. The "A-level" syllabus and examination papers, plus the trademarked designated "A-level exam" will not be licensed to any fee-paying school.
3. Fee-paying schools will have to take "international baccalaureates" or something, in the knowledge that these qualifications are not recognised for purposes of the university admissions process (various tedious bollocks sorting out the Treaty of Rome implications of this, can't be bothered to work it out).
4. If the private education industry want to set up their own parallel university system, then let them go for it, but Oxford, Cambridge, London, Bristol et al are staying in the state sector, by confiscatory statute law if necessary.
Basically, if the upper classes want to run a class-entry-certification system, they can pay the whole cost of doing so. No more using our state funded prestige universities for the purpose.
re: 131
I bow before the master. *applause*
I guess the main thing I would like to see in the US is more aggregation of resources, so that most places have one school district per county (if not some larger geographic region), not per city/town/township/suburb/whatever. Once you're operating at the scale of the sort of system I grew up in, with over a hundred schools operated out of one funding pool, it's not clear to me what the right tradeoff is between wanting to let people go to their local schools and wanting to mix races/social classes/etc. But the sort of system some places (like where I live now) have, where there's some kind of municipal boundary every few miles and they all have totally independent schools operated out of different pots of money, is a disaster.
131: the loophole here is that you go to private school till the age of 16, switch to a state school for sixth-form, do your A-levels with (as it were) a running start, and then get into university.
The system of school funding in Ohio, where I currently live, was declared unconstitutional like a decade ago, and nothing has been done about it. The same is true for the last state I lived in, New York. I get the impression that this is true almost everywhere.
Funding schools out of local property taxes is one of those ideas like electing judges or the war on drugs or the electoral college: ideas that are so incredibly fucking stupid that no one can argue for them in good faith and so incredibly entrenched that they are just never ever going to change.
Also: allowing colleges to give preference to the children of alumni: a policy with no intellectually honest advocates that is never ever going away.
Basically, if the upper classes want to run a class-entry-certification system, they can pay the whole cost of doing so. No more using our state funded prestige universities for the purpose.
Huzzah.
switch to a state school for sixth-form
Makes a certain amount of sense, although since the secondary curriculum take six years and cannot be joined half-way through, it's quite a *slow* way on to the fast track.
127: Yeah, I'm not surprised at the failure of the schools to produce absolutely equal academic results regardless of social class. I'm surprised at the failure of the schools to produce absolutely equal physical conditions, enrichment opportunities, and other resources regardless of social class.
3
I look terrible in caps. Is there an actual argument against making teaching a high status, highly paid profession? Dont we have a surplus of academics? (Sorry, guys. )
Sure, teachers (within the range commonly found in the United States) don't make much difference so it is a waste of money paying them more in order to try to attract "good" ones. Especially since it is difficult to tell the "good" ones from the "bad" ones.
As for different funding, funding doesn't vary all that much and makes little differeence in any case. Schools are called good when most of their students are good (rich and smart) and bad when most of their students are bad (poor and stupid). Exchange the student populations and your excellent school will magically become lousy and your dysfunctional bad school will magically become good.
And the range of student abilities is wider in the US.
And the range of student abilities is wider in the US.
What's this supposed to mean?
re: 142
More black people and immigrants, chris. We've discussed this before. Ad infinitum.
Oh, and I assume there's a gini coefficient element. More relative poor, too.
It comes up in all education discussions.
'Our schools have lower standards because we have to cope with much higher levels of immigration.'
This is factually false, of course.
142
What's this supposed to mean?
How well students will do in school is primarily predicted by characterstics of the students not characteristics of the school. There is a fairly large random component for individual students but this washes out when looking at groups of students. This predicted range will be wider in places like the United States which are less homgeneous than Scotland.
144
'Our schools have lower standards because we have to cope with much higher levels of immigration.'
So immigration has nothing to do with why California's schools which used to be considered "good" are now considered "bad"?
By "immigration", James of course means "the defective inheritors of inferior Mayan genes". I don't know exactly why the Mayans are supposed to be so genetically dumb, but that's the barely-concealed subtext.
It's false because, among other things, the US doesn't have particularly high rates of immigration compared with many other OECD countries. I have no interest in retreading this particular debate. Crypto-Charles Murray trolling is boring.
147
By "immigration", James of course means "the defective inheritors of inferior Mayan genes". I don't know exactly why the Mayans are supposed to be so genetically dumb, but that's the barely-concealed subtext.
It is an empirical fact that (under current conditions) black and Hispanic students do not do as well in public schools as whites and Asians. If you don't adjust for this schools will appear to be performing worse when the fraction of blacks and Hispanics increases although nothing about the teachers or physical facilities has changed.
You can argue about the reasons for these gaps but anyone who thinks they can be easily eliminated by fiddling with the schools is not living in the real world.
ttaM,
So the substantive differences between our positions are: a) you think that schools should be designed to help those that are struggling most, and those who are doing well should be left to sort themselves out, as they are obviously able to, whereas I think that we can help both groups (and the broad continuum in which we all exist), sometimes through different methods/pedagogies; b) you are fine with tracking or other methods of differentiation within schools, but feel that everyone should go to the same school in a given locality, whereas I think that there are, at least within the existing education system that I know, some real advantages for a variety of students, including those that are struggling or who have more specialized affinities, in allowing school choice. Those are indeed radically different positions, rather than differences of opinion about how to achieve a common set of goals. On a), I would just reiterate that smart kids aren't just the rich and privileged and that, as old fashioned and elitist as it sounds, Du Bois's "talented tenth" proposition still holds some truth. On b) the other thing to consider, at least in my country, where education budgets are always up for chopping, is that you can afford to pursue more different and experiemental educational approaches if you can conduct them across a school district with students allowed to transfer to participate, rather than try and replicate them in each individual school.
124
This gets attributed to things like middle-class parents watchdogging the management of their local schools, where poor parents don't, but I honestly don't understand why, other than malice, the schools in poor areas can't be run better regardless of parental involvement.
Well, first of all, "parental involvement" isn't just watchdogging, it's also volunteering. I believe BPhD. has commented on spendings hours in her son's classroom. That's worth having and worth paying for because it's valuable adult supervision often with at least some training and experience, and even when the parent is a complete idiot they at least provide basic supervision and a bit of a safety net for the real teacher. Schools in middle-class communities get that stuff for free; schools in lower-class communities do without. Beyond that, it doesn't take "malice" for things to not come to the attention of management. An incompetent or lazy or openly racist or favorite-playing teacher will be noticed sooner and dealt with more effectively if parents notice it and complain to the right people. Hopefully, of course, the administration would notice them eventually even without complaints, but realistically, parental attention gets it dealt with earlier.
Then there are all the home-life factors that don't relate directly to school management but make middle-class homes better places from an educational point of view- fewer distractions, parents are more likely to have the time and inclination to read to young kids and insist that older kids do their homework, etc.
the secondary curriculum takes six years and cannot be joined half-way through
dsquared, I really don't think this can be true (surely you just do your GCSEs at private school, then switch school and spend two years doing A-levels) - or do you mean that this is the way it would be in your ideal system? Because you'll need to allow people to join the state-school system at any age, in order to permit e.g. recently immigrated kids to get an education.
I don't know exactly why the Mayans are supposed to be so genetically dumb
Well, they couldn't even get wheels right. That's pretty dumb.
Systems in which everyone goes to the same school are NOT systems in which everyone has to i) learn the same material, and ii) that material has to be boring and unchallenging for those who are academically able. 99% of US people seem unable to envisage a system in which this is the case.
If you have separate tracks of classes then I don't understand what you're gaining by having those tracks *in the same building.* And if you have everyone in the same class then what do you mean by people learning different material?
I wonder whether the range of students is much smaller where you are, because there's nothing you could teach that I didn't know when I was 10 years old, and which the seniors at the school where my wife works would understand. (And her job is precisely trying to introduce interesting material. But they don't know anything, can't really read, and don't find anything interesting.)
I'd have thought it'd be obvious? There are strong social benefits to having a mixed ability school. All those problems the supposed bright kids suffer are ameliorated by the fact that there are a reasonable amount of them, aspirational working class kids don't have to fuck off and abandon all their friends because they do well in exams, everyone benefits from mixing with a range of people from different social and economic backgrounds, and educational abilities. The school gains the benefit of having middle-class parents invested in the school, and all of those other good things. It's not hard to understand. All of those nice things that everyone claims middle-class schools full of bright kids get? The things that are so crucial that bright poor kids have to be removed from their peer group, so they can gain the benefit of them. Guess what? Everyone else gets 'em, too.
I'd guess the range of abilities at the school I went to is about the same as anywhere else. Some people right at the bottom, some right at the top, and a lot of people somewhere in between.
Were you working hard on calculus at 10, maybe teaching yourself Latin? Real question. Because that's what seniors [or the equivalent thereof] would have been working on in my school. If so, fine, you were way out at one end of the bell-curve, but the number of people who are there are so small they are just noise in the education system. In a mixed ability school some people at 16 will be doing basic arithmetic, and some people are doing calculus. It's not rocket science to understand the basic idea.
or do you mean that this is the way it would be in your ideal system?
substituting for the word "ideal" the words "ill thought out and totalitarian", yes.
The seniors in the school my wife works at can't really read, don't understand what subtraction means, and don't know the difference between a centimeter and a meter. They also can't understand an analogy and don't know how to do anything even a tiny bit open-ended. Basically they learn some game where the teacher says one word and they learn the word you're supposed to answer without actually understanding any of it.
Not only are they not learning latin, as my wife recently found out *they didn't know that latin is not a synonym of spanish*. (Not sure which class that was, they might not have been seniors.)
(I wasn't learning calculus until 12, but that's a totally different point. Basically there's no way for schools to deal with extreme outliers like me in mathematics other than leaving them alone with books and/or sending them to college classes.)
It seems to me (judging from what I heard about Berkeley high) that UMC parents in the US are perfectly capable of only supporting *part* of a public school (the parts that have their kids) while letting the other parts suffer. I think here you might just end up with the honors classes in one wing, the other classes in another wing, and not much in the way of helpful interactions between the two. (After all, if you make the honors kids walk through a non-honors hallway and they get beat up their parents are going to complain.)
156: First, that sounds terrible. But second, that's not really a feature of her students, but of her students given the lousy schools they've been in so far. You couldn't fill a school with kids that fundamentally incapable unless you were selecting for learning disabilities.
Something has to get fixed at the grade-school level -- looking at current high school seniors tells us about the schools more than the kids.
re: 156.1
I still don't get why the fact that some people need remedial education, and some benefit from more difficult material means they have to be entirely segregated from each other. I'm not sure you are understanding what mixed ability means. In a big high school there are what, 300 or more kids in any single year? They don't all sit in the same class-room, so there's absolutely no problem with having different maths classes for different people.
re: 156.last
Maybe get over yourself, eh? 99% of the people here are/were academic outliers. I still don't think they should be in different schools from everyone else.
re: 157
The fact that the middle-classes are cunts isn't an excuse.
'We want honours classes to be funded better than remedial classes'
'Guess what, you can't fucking have it.'
Problem solved.
Of course, in NYC the students with any initiative end up going to a better school than the one my wife works at. So if they use ttaM's system there would presumably be some better students in the school than there are now. Perhaps even enough more to run an actual honors class (currently "honors" just means that the students are well-behaved).
I never felt that parents were particularly invested in my high school, but it is true that while the honors students got an incredible education and those wanting vocational training got really good specific help, there wasn't much for students in the middle.
159.last: "Funding" isn't the issue here. It's things like which teachers get assigned to which classes, which classes are using lab material already owned by the school, which classes are getting volunteers, etc. It seems very hard to deal with that by fiat from above because it's the squeaky wheel that gets the oil...
162: As a matter of practice in the US, I agree with you that this sort of thing is a huge problem. But the answer has just got to be better management. If the people administering the system genuinely want to be providing an equal level of services to all the students in the system, it's not difficult -- the hard bit is just making them want to do it.
re: 162
There's a perpetual tension between providing a fair and equitable distribution of resources, and giving those with power and influence what they want. We don't have to accept that those with power and influence get what they want as if it's some law of nature. The middle classes being right cunts when it comes to clawing every ounce of advantage for their kids is an unfortunate thing to be dealt with, but it should largely be dealt with by not giving them what they want.
If people want their kids to have preferential access to facilities at the school the right and proper answer is 'No!'.
I think it also has to do with flexibility and preparedness for students with different needs. My school was really good at just letting students work at their own pace. It wasn't just students whose parents bitched who got to work ahead in math and languages; they had programs to test and fast-track outliers from 5th grade up in math, and in high school for foreign language and science. It's not like it cost them a ton of money; they just figured out how to do right by students who wanted to get a lot done in school.
A shorter version of 164 would be something like, 'My political beliefs are to the left of Thatcher and Reagan.'
Here's the thing, you want to see pleasant, NPR-listening, soccer-supporting, bicycle-riding, recycling-doing liberal middle class parents turn into vicious racists? Try messing around with schools.
It's really just that simple. There is no solution to the public school dilemma in the US that does not involve overcoming a massive amount of resistance to change on the part of many, many people. And those people, by and large, are the voters, the caucus-goers, the neighborhood organizers and the phone-bank manners. It's not just bad luck that Jonathan Kozol has been writing the same book for the past 30 years. We really do have a huge reservoir of racism, class bigotry and fear to overcome if we are going to change the way the public schools work for the better.
So I don't really see what the point of arguing about tracking, gifted & talented programs, etc. is. Ultimately, that's just window-dressing. Until there is the political will to upend the apple-cart, nothing substantial is going to improve. The light at the end of the tunnel would seem to be the majority-minority singularity, which cannot approach fast enough for my money.
Scratch a parent and a Shearer bleeds.
159.middle You seem to have misunderstood me, I was saying that outliers like me in math are *not* an argument against your position, because unless you're in Moscow, DC, or NYC, you're not going to have a high school capable of dealing with really extreme outliers. Yes most people here were academic outliers in some sense of the word outlier, and yes all schools should (in a better world) be equipped to deal with 2 or 3 standard deviations off the mean, but the 4-5 sd range is just not something schools can reasonably be equipped to deal with.
166: ttaM, while I really agree very strongly with most of what you're saying here, the way you're attributing right-wing values to anyone who's disagreeing makes me want to kick you in the side of the head, and not in the fun, French, campy kind of way.
We're starting from an insanely fragmented set of school systems that's been set up to privilege better-off students, and that is legally extremely difficult to change other than fragment by fragment. Because a given reform seems implausible or impractical under US circumstances doesn't make anyone who thinks it won't work an unthinking servant of the right of the economic elite to unlimited privilege.
you're not going to have a high school capable of dealing with really extreme outliers
Why not? My school would have put that person in an independent study situation.
I mean, if you wanted to have guided classroom instruction with a full class of peers all doing postgraduate-level math, yes, you'd have to find a special school, but if you could get books and space in the teacher's lounge with regular meetings with an instructor, they'd let you do it.
170: Right, that's what they should do. But it's obviously inferior to having someone who can answer questions. The point is that fiddling here-and-there about how far you're busing people isn't going to change that. Whereas say at the top 5% going to a different school might make the difference between learning stuff and not.
Eh, I'm not terrifically worried that the truly freakishly brilliant weren't challenged enough in their one area of interest. In cases of truly outlying talent, teachers at our school would set up students with internships or after-school work in environments where they could get more professional help. But the school's job is to prepare those students for college, and, if possible, give them a head start by doing college-level work.
In my own experience, I ended up being way overprepared for college, and found the first year so boring I almost dropped out. I worked like a dog in high school and was surprised to learn that for a lot of people high school is a cakewalk.
That is, if you're a scary math genius, you're probably going to find ways to pursue your interest outside of school, whether by studying on your own, finding mentors at the local college, or whatever. Someone still has to teach you how to write, how government works, etc.
Right, that was my point, really extreme outliers aren't a big deal for policy. That's why I put it in parenthesis and said that it wasn't the point. Schools should be equipped to deal with the variation that they're likely to have enrolled at any given time, and variation beyond the "once-in-four-years" range is not worth worrying about.
By the way, there's a fun piece in the LRB which is scathing towards the Ivy league (and the US university system in general), in a way that is difficult to imagine being published in a US publication.
And if we factor in that the US invests more than twice as much of its GDP in higher education as the UK, even in the top tier, where the strength of the American system is concentrated, UK investment in higher education seems to be yielding almost three times the return. In the bottom half of the table, British universities appear to be offering a staggering 12 times better value for money. .... Measure for measure, US universities are manifestly not the 'best of the best'. If value for money is the most important consideration, especially in an age of austerity, the American model might well be the last one that Britain should be emulating.
154 There are strong social benefits to having a mixed ability school. All those problems the supposed bright kids suffer are ameliorated by the fact that there are a reasonable amount of them, aspirational working class kids don't have to fuck off and abandon all their friends because they do well in exams, everyone benefits from mixing with a range of people from different social and economic backgrounds, and educational abilities. The school gains the benefit of having middle-class parents invested in the school, and all of those other good things.
I pretty much agree with all of this, but I think that in the US, to get this kind of mixed ability, mixed social class school, you're usually forced to give up on "every student goes to their local school" and institute some kind of system that rearranges people over a bigger geographical area.
I also think there's a place for the sort of magnet high school I went to, because I don't think I would be where I am today without it, but I don't see the point in arguing it here. For elementary and middle school I really think it's worthwhile to keep even the people a few sigma on the high end of the curve in a mixed environment.
Re 169
I'm very tired of 'realism'. If your starting point is always 'well given that we are going to give the forces of reaction everything they want, how do we advance a progressive agenda?' my sympathy or patience will be slim.
I'm not imputing right wing values to anyone. I'm saying that my views are of the left, and I think about equality in a way that is different to you. This is clearly true.
So if the US spends twice as much of its GDP than the UK on higher education, and vastly more on health care, what is the UK spending large portions of its GDP on that the US isn't? Royal weddings can't be that expensive....
177.last Right, that was the point I was trying to make in 86. I don't see why you should have differentiated schools for 18-20 year olds but not 16-18 year olds. It seems that any argument for the latter should also hold for the former. (But perhaps I'm missing something.)
That piece was the stupidest thing I've read on the LRB website in the five years that I've been basically reading everything on the LRB website that is available to non-subscribers. A: What does the list of "top 100 universities in the world" mean? Top for what purpose? B: That is basically no data points at all, not to mention being unrepresentative. C: The whole thing could have been rewritten in the form of about three bar graphs plus captions.
If your starting point is always 'well given that we are going to give the forces of reaction everything they want, how do we advance a progressive agenda?' my sympathy or patience will be slim.
And if your starting point is "Why don't we ride our unicorns powered by our love for our fellow man to the place where every child can get an excellent education", while I'm very sure you're a better, leftier person than I am, I'm also very sure that nothing you say about education policy in the US is going to tell me anything useful.
Admitting that we have policy constraints and trying to work around them is not the same thing as giving the forces of reaction everything they ask for. It's even possible that someone could be wrong about the nature of the constraints that exist, and still be merely mistaken rather than craven and lickspittle.
How is "you can only get into a given school by purchasing property" a *left-wing* alternative to a lottery?
178: Again, I agree with you about the vast majority of this stuff. I just think you're being a jerk about characterizing largely pragmatic disagreements as a clash of values in which you care about equality in a fundamentally different way than anyone else in the conversation.
That piece was the stupidest thing I've read on the LRB website in the five years that I've been basically reading everything on the LRB website that is available to non-subscribers. A: What does the list of "top 100 universities in the world" mean? Top for what purpose? B: That is basically no data points at all, not to mention being unrepresentative.
I don't disagree with any of that, by the way. I assume that the rankings are slightly less stupid than US News & World Reports rankings, but only slightly.
But I found it interesting rhetorically.
I mean I agree with your base point that most UMC parents are evil and that we shouldn't be pandering to them. But your solution seems to be "make the problem worse and assume that you've done other magical things to make the problem better." Forcing people to buy property to get into a school is a *problem* not a *solution*.
You can always rent, you short-sighted rich dude.
For contrast my ideal system would be something like:
A (secure computer-run no-cheating) countywide lottery system that resulted in racially and class integrated schools while keeping siblings in the same school and minimizing busing lengths combined with a few magnet high schools (say one science magnet and one arts magnet).
In a big high school there are what, 300 or more kids in any single year? They don't all sit in the same class-room, so there's absolutely no problem with having different maths classes for different people.
I went to a public high school that worked the way ttaM is describing here, and it seemed to work pretty well -- but, at the same time, I pretty much only interacted with the other kids who were taking the honors classes, and those students were curiously a lot whiter and more well-off than the population of the school as a whole.
The municipally chopped-up and reportedly horribly managed school districts in the metro area we're going to be moving to in about a year are distressing me. I am not looking forward to thinking about how to incorporate this information into our decision about where to buy a house.
188: Not in a lot of districts in the US.
191: I know. If you read up at the start, I was making similar points.
189: Oh and probably also some sort of vocational training alternative to high school.
say one science magnet and one arts magnet
Combine them. It made high school more interesting.
194: You'd think as a mathematician who met all his friends in high school through theater that might have occurred to me... But apparently not...
I went to a public high school that worked the way ttaM is describing here, and it seemed to work pretty well -- but, at the same time, I pretty much only interacted with the other kids who were taking the honors classes
Same here. I probably had the same peers in most of my classes from late middle school on when the tracks really kicked in. There wasn't much interaction between the academically inclined and the not so inclined.
189: One of the bullshit things about NYC and their various public schools and charter schools and lotteries is that each school seems to run their own lottery. That totally needs to be centralized.
Some of it's centralized, but not all, which is loony.
Hrm, somehow I think on both sides of the argument the idea is that people should be able to go to highschool with their friends. In ttaM's world that means people from the seem class background should get to go to high school together regardless of their level of academic achievement, and to nerds in the US that means getting to go to school with other nerds.
Which is to say this probably isn't really a matter of education policy or politics in general, but instead a matter of the culture of 16 year olds in different parts of the world.
I went to an IB program within the poor high school in town, with the result that there was a radical class/racial divide and in some ways it was very, very tense. Although I didn't pick up on that much at the time.
If it isn't clear already, I've never experienced a school that was all G&T or all anything. The Gifted and Talented Magnet at my school (also a performing arts magnet, also the school I would have gone to by neighborhood anyway, also located in the predominantly African American part of St. Paul) was there alongside all the classes for folks who didn't take part in either of those things. I can only imagine an all G&T school (which doesn't seem like a good idea to me either) in giantsville places like NYC.
Sally's school doesn't call itself G&T, but it is exam-based admissions (limited by neighborhood, so only kids living in Manhattan north of 96th can go). It's co-located in the same building with an elementary/middle school and a KIPP charter school, but there's not a lot of social interaction. Relations with the KIPP school are actually fairly tense, or so Sally tells me.
I don't think of people who didn't do well at school as other.
Going back to way earlier, that conflates two very different things. The divide in the red parts of the US between "people who are likely to move out of the county" and "people who are unlikely to move out of the county" is not at all about doing well in school. It's about the divides of 16-year old culture. Similarly the working class/middle class distinction that ttaM feels so hard is all about the divides in 16-year old culture, and not about how much money people make (or even the jobs that they have now!).
201: I went to a magnet program with a similar divide. I think the local kids resented the hell out of us nerds, and the nerds were scared as hell of the local kids.
The metropolitan school district across the river from us has a program at the zoo that used to be solely vocational as students took regular classes and also learned zookeeper/conservationist skills, but now is more college-prep in orientation. There are only a handful of students involved in it, but little programs like that seem interesting to me in terms of meeting the interests of actual students. I suspect funding is a nightmare, though.
One thing I don't think has been mentioned yet is the difficulty poor families have staying within a neighborhood. This is a huge issue in foster care, where most kids are being moved out of their neighborhoods and different areas have different policies on whether to try to maintain school stability or make the foster parents' amount of driving easier. It's just a big problem in general, though, that while a lot of the poorer areas around here stay pretty much the same in terms of demographics from one year to the next, individual kids within the system are moving in and out of schools all the time. Here at the border, that means hopping from one state to another, too. I don't think any of the hypothetical proposals for neighborhood schools are set up to deal with that constant flux.
Hrm, "red" isn't quite the right word, because I'm sure the non-Boston parts of New England have the same divide.
Well, the answer to that is "centralise the funding". How do you herd the cats? Move the food.
74: First up, when the ukfogged junta seizes power, with D^2 as Central Bank Director and Regime's Civilised Man, Ttam as Minister for Social Re-Education and Enforcement, Charlie as Architect for the Reconstruction of London and Minister of War Production, self as Director of Propaganda, BBC Director General, Editor of the Official Monitor, and Administrator of the Revolutionary Blog, etc, about the first thing that will change is Belle & Sebastian. Just after we requisition the Wapping printing plant, their work is going on the index and they will be lucky to escape with their lives. I know for a fact that three out of the four members of the Junta despise B&S with passion.
Secondly, I disagree with the sentiment on its merits. When I was a smart kid in a large comprehensive school, really, few things did me more good than getting over the whole odd-boy-sat-down-on-the-football-field stereotype (because it *is* a stereotype) and not spending quite as much time staring into the depths of my 15-year old soul. Actually, there are worse things in the world than double games (and do you see why I hate Belle & Sebastian quite so much? Jesus wept, people are starving!). Experiencing the world physically does not require you to be stupid or conventional and should not be a signifier of class either.
Thirdly, I had a really hard time (partly because of my own arrogance, wilful eccentricity, etc) but the last thing I would recommend would be filtering out "the smart kids". What I would recommend is punishing the violent kids. Really. Some percentage of them will be like that and they'll be like that as long as there are no consequences for being like that. When consequences arrived, one way or another, I recall that some of them ended up being quite reasonable and well balanced as soon as they faced a minimal deterrent. I do believe that this is more of a learned behaviour than a personality trait.
One of the reasons why I don't recommend pulling out the smart kids is that in the UK, at least, people who talk about their brat needing to be "stretched" always, always turn out to want more stuff for them and less for Those People. If your kid is genuinely smart, you know what? They will do things that interest them. Let them. It's really not a problem. It's not the same thing as being expected for class reasons to go to Oxford and read whatever degree your repellent super-entitled parents think is Best For You.
Another is that it's perfectly possible to score well on tests and still be a power-addicted cunt. Intelligence and character are weakly correlated. Some of the predators in my monkey house were respectably smart. It is true that none of them were really brilliant - the smart smart kids ended up either in the grey-but-elite or the art/music/political/snark/drugs freak layer - but there were several who could have just about tested into a "smart kid" program and had the sort of pushy well-off doctorlawyerwhatever parents who would have whined endlessly until they got it. And they would have found reasons to torment the other "smart kids" unless they got the jump on them.
I disagree with the sentiment on its merits.
Which sentiment are you disagreeing with? I don't think anyone's said that bright kids should be separated out for social protection or to avoid athletics where their local schools are perfectly academically functional.
208 about the first thing that will change is Belle & Sebastian. Just after we requisition the Wapping printing plant, their work is going on the index and they will be lucky to escape with their lives. I know for a fact that three out of the four members of the Junta despise B&S with passion.
I'm sure some of us over here can cook up a plan to offer them asylum.
Shorter me: Life is a mixed ability environment. This is annoying but preferable to the alternatives, so you might as well get used to it.
Also, another decree from the junta: anyone who tries to send their kid to university at age 13 or whatever will be shot as a child abuser. Education is NOT an exercise in passing as many exams as quickly as possible. If you're a brilliant mathematician, well, you can be one who can put up with working with 99% of the population and who has a girlfriend and perhaps even some other vocational skills or contact with other scientific disciplines, rather than a fundamentally fucked-up hangar-queen experiment constantly threatening to go out of kilter and put yourself and those around you in the psych ward.
You know, I've been seeing references to B&S for ages now and couldn't name a song. Is there one I'm likely to have heard of? (Linking to Youtube is useless until I get home).
209: The B&S lyric, but also the whole project of gifted'n'talented.
Actually, there are worse things in the world than double games (and do you see why I hate Belle & Sebastian quite so much? Jesus wept, people are starving!).
I know you like her
Well I like her too
I know she likes you
It's not as if I'm being sent off to War
There are worse things in this world
See, the devil can quote Belle & Sebastian for his purposes.
211.2: I think having a policy on this one is borrowing trouble. A kid you could plausibly send to university at 13 is going to be a weird enough kid that your best course is to look at the individual kid and figure out what's likely to suit her best. Given that there may be one or two in the country in any given year, it's not a major problem.
Psst, dudes, we need to start organizing against this new junta. They're starting to freak me out.
It's still better than the time we set up Shearer and McManus as co-dictators.
That reminds me, we need to appoint a member for nuclear command and control and an alternate.
Yeah, I had to request asylum at EotAW. Where would I seek refuge now?
211.2 is also complicated by the existence of colleges (or college programs) which are exclusively for younger teenagers. The people I know who went to those colleges younger were on the margin much more likely to date in high school than comparable people who didn't.
My school growing up was too small to have some "gifted and talented" program. Students who might be in such a program if it existed went to the community college one town over for some classes.
Just an anecdote. Doesn't work for everyone, of course; matching up the high school and college schedule was weird, and of course not everyone lives close enough to college. (Although I'll bet most people live closer to one than I did.)
Also "life is mixed ability environment" just doesn't seem true to me. Everyone says this about high school, but the awful people who everyone hated in high school are working at the Sheetz down the street, and the maladjusted nerds are working at google and interact socially with other smart people.
Given that there may be one or two in the country in any given year, it's not a major problem.
Depends what you mean, I think. There are certainly hundreds, if not more, kids in the country in any given year who could start college at 13 and do better than the average college student, or even than fairly good but not way-on-the-tail college students. I doubt there are even one or two in a typical year who could go to a top university and really excel there, though; even most people who are close to being able to are going to have a more successful college career, better odds for grad school, etc. if they wait a while.
re: 185
But they aren't just pragmatic disagreements. That's the point. There's a deep ideological difference at the root of much of this.
I'm not a pony/unicorn kind of guy. My position is something like this:
'Look, educational equality is something we should really strive for. Segregation by ability is just as pernicious as segregation by race and economics. Especially when it's segregation by ability _in addition_ to race and economics, rather than _instead of_. There are lots of obstacles in the way of this, some deeply non-trivial, but nonetheless, this should be our aim.'
Responses range from:
'Is that even possible? How can it be possible to educate people together?' -- basically 'the Bell Curve is too wide'.
'Think of the smart children.'
To something like what I take to be your position:
'This isn't something immediately achievable here. It's not even close to be achievable any time soon.'
Which really _is_ fine, if taken purely as a statement of pragmatics, but so often in discussion with American liberals the follow up is then, 'and so we shouldn't want it at all. We should do our best to ameliorate the worst excesses of the current system for those we can most immediately help, and that's basically all.'
And that's exactly the effect that talk of ponies and unicorns has -- it's about putting people who aren't procedural liberals in their place. It shuts down discussions of ideology and reduces everything to narrow procedularism, and I don't buy that. One can be ideologically committed to something while accepting that it might not happen right away. It's how the left has worked for a century. The strand of liberal/centrist thought that drops ideology in favour of nibbling away at the edges of inequity has failed.
I was being hyperbolic there. Just that 'what do do with kids so freakishly advanced that enrolling them in college at 13 looks like a better idea than keeping them in high school' isn't the kind of problem you need a broadbased policy solution for -- there's going to be few enough to play it by ear.
'Look, educational equality is something we should really strive for
What does educational equality even mean?
Does it mean that a fish needs to take swimming lessons with a horse?
That a sparrow and a elephant should have to attend the same class in flying?
I had to google "Sheetz" but I would like to denounce 222 on general principle (one of the correct things Alex says is that smart kids can be the assholes), but also in the hopes that the junta will be less likely to suspect me plotting against them.
re: 226
Yes, because bright kids and not-so bright kids are different species.
but so often in discussion with American liberals the follow up is then, 'and so we shouldn't want it at all. We should do our best to ameliorate the worst excesses of the current system for those we can most immediately help, and that's basically all.'
Who here said anything interpretable as this to you?
I didn't bring up the unicorns until after you'd already characterized the alternative position as "given that we are going to give the forces of reaction everything they want." Attributing that kind of pusillanimous preemptive surrender to everyone who's questioning your policy proposals is going to annoy the fuck out of people, like me, who do agree with your goals.
re: 227
Maybe we'll find you a nice job polishing the AKs.
224 makes it sound like you also think that universities should be leveled out academically.
228: I was riffing on Blake's line on oppression.
I suppose my perspective is skewed, but there are wide variations in human ability that have no relation to class/race etc.
re: 231
Yeah, I'd like to see university admissions and funding substantially reformed, too.
230: Ooh, thank you Generalissimo! It would be an honor to serve the revolution in whatever capacity I am able.
*Rubs hands together*
{sotto voce}It's all coming together now.
Then yes, I definitely disagree with you about more than just pragmatics. I think the idea that people like me should never ever (or even never before graduate school) get to take a class where I'm an average student in the class is a terrible terrible idea.
236: Given this from 100:
Systems in which everyone goes to the same school are NOT systems in which everyone has to i) learn the same material
I doubt that's what ttaM's saying -- he doesn't in fact seem to oppose segregation by academic ability so long as it's on a class-by-class basis, rather than a school basis.
I'm totally unclear on what ttaM pictures when ending segregation by ability, as well. (Maybe this was spelled out upthread.)
Most high schools have a big range of wealth and school-saviness of kids attending them, although the median varies with the location.
Most high schools offer classes a la carte at all levels, some honors and some not, and having kids take the resulting class seems to be what's already done in most schools.
Funding is local, which is insane, and should be centralized. But I'm not clear on what ttaM's proposing beyond this.
237: But that doesn't make any sense at all at the college level.
How does "Segregation by ability is just as pernicious as segregation by race and economics" mean "it's ok to have classes segregated by ability, just so long as schools aren't"?
re: 237
Yeah. Sometimes I'd expect you might want within class division by small group, sometimes different streams within a subject taught in entirely separate classrooms, sometimes everyone does the same. It's going to vary. So, you might want to stream maths, or physics, say, but not some other subjects within everyone attending the same civics class, or sports classes, maybe doing history or philosophy together. I'm not committed to a specific structure -- it's bound to vary a lot from subject to subject -- so much as the general principle that as much as possible should be shared, and even if not everything is, there are lots of areas of school life where they can be.
240: Don't bring ttaM down with your pragmatics!
240: It doesn't, but in a heated conversation everyone misspeaks. Let it pass.
It's not really very hard to understand the idea that as much as possible, and for as long as possible, you might want to resist segregating people from each other. And, to the extent that pragmatic features of education make it inevitable, you do so as little as possible and within a broader context in which people remain integrated together.
I'm not sure how to read "just as" without violating the analogy ban, but surely segregating classrooms by race is much much more pernicious than dividing classes up based on learning ability.
240 is the norm already, aside from funding. Funding is the whole problem. What, beyond funding, are we debating?
Anyway, I'm off to the pub to get drunk.
238: NO WIRE HANGERS EVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
240 is the suburban and rural norm. Big-city high schools are much more likely to be segregated by ability, because the system is dense enough to make travel to alternative schools possible.
I see how "keeping everyone together" is a positive good, but I just don't understand why it's so obvious that it's such a better good than "giving everyone the opportunity to thrive." It seems to me that there's some point in education where these two goods balance each other out, and so sometime (after 12 and before 20) you start moving to a system that lets people study with their academic peers rather than the people they live near.
Also, keeping everyone together in the context of the US is almost diametrically opposed to "make everyone go to their local school."
245: The people are, for the most part, self-segregating.
250: right, I was mostly offering up that there was plenty of evidence for what ttaM's dream system in looks like, already. Aside from the funding issue.
The funding is a big deal, of course, but no one here argues for local funding.
The funding, and the ability to exclude students who don't live in the right district for the good school; like that poor woman who just got arrested for fraud because she enrolled her kid in a school district she didn't live in.
251.2 Also, keeping everyone together in the context of the US is almost diametrically opposed to "make everyone go to their local school."
Which is something I've tried to say about three times in this thread, apparently failing either to be clear or interesting when I tried.
255: More all caps and f-bombs might fix your problem.
In Austin, there are probably 2-3 terrible high schools, 2-3 high schools where wealthy parents would fight to get a stray person's kid evicted, and 5-7 midrange high schools.
It's very hard for me to assess - on a societal level - the size of the problems at a midrange high school. Are they serving 75% of the students well? Are they only serving 25% of the students well?
Everyone thinks their own schools are pretty great, it's just the rest of the country that's going down the tube. (There was a recent study about this phenomenon, IIRC.) I really don't know whether a midrange school is in crisis or not.
255: Everybody has said it three times. And nobody has gotten a response more engaging than, "You don't understand Scotland."
Further to 202: When I was doing student organizing with people from Pongo's school, the main thing they complained about was that the school administration was always gulling the district and the parents with this veneer of multiculturalism, when in fact the tracking system that was in place basically ensured that only the absolute minimum of cross-class and cross-race interaction could occur.
So just to channel my 15 year-old self for a moment, maybe one of the biggest problems is that educational policy is set by a class of people, adults, who are only affected by it indirectly, while the class that has to live and breathe it, the students, have virtually no say in what happens.
I have softened somewhat in the intervening half of my life that has occurred since leaving HS, but I still feel like there has to be some substantial kids lib reform that happens before any big positive change can come to pass.
I don't know, honestly. NYC has some pretty terrible high schools -- the place where Rhymeswithmaria teaches sounds like one of them. It also has some okay ones and some excellent ones. Strict 'go to the closest school' would, I think, not improve the worst schools much, but would level stuff out between the excellent and the okay. (Guessing based on residential patterns.)
258: I wouldn't have minded 'You don't understand Scotland.' I don't, honestly -- sounds like a nice place, but once you get past whisky, shortbread, and tartan that's about all I know. I got cranky at 'you don't value equality the same way I do.'
Fwiw, the school she's at probably doesn't qualify as "terrible" on the NYC scale. The students just don't know or learn anything, but it's not a dangerous place to be. I think their graduation rate is decent.
I agree with 261. I certainly don't understand Scotland. At ttaM seems to not understand the US. It'd be much more interesting to learn what make Scotland different than to say that busing means that we're rabid right-wingers who want to segregate based on ability...
Seniors in high school who have trouble subtracting counts as terrible even if the school's safe, I'd think.
They can subtract, they just don't know what subtraction means. That is if you say "what's 5 minus 3" most of them can do it (though they didn't know that "multiplication" was a synonym for "times" and meant use the "multiply" button), what they couldn't do was realize that if you have a cup full of stuff and you know the weight of the whole thing and the weight of the cup that *the operation that you do to get the weight of just the stuff* is subtraction.
I would have guessed seniors in high school who have trouble subtracting is closer to "typical" than "terrible."
OK, maybe not subtracting. Dividing, certainly.
265: Oh, yeah, that sounds much more ordinary than what I was thinking. Still depressing, but not weird.
You know the funny thing about that sort of kid? They could probably figure out the weight of just the stuff fine if you asked them outside of a math class context, just like the same person who freezes up at a "If Carol leaves City A at 7:30 am, and drives 45 miles per hour.." kind of problem doesn't actually have any trouble figuring out how long it will take to get from Columbus to Cincinnati if they drive the limit all the way.
This is a big problem in math generally. Almost a quarter of my calculus students don't know what derivatives mean (even though they can take them), and around a third don't know what integrals mean. (I know this because I asked them on the final.) So although it's shocking that they don't know what subtraction means as seniors in high school, it's not really surprising, and I don't think it qualifies them as all that terrible.
268: It's possible... But I kind of suspect that most of them just don't have times in their daily life where they're figuring stuff out. I'm sure the kids who deal drugs understand subtraction, but when those kids are in school it's to get business done not to listen to the teacher.
I'm chiming in with Unfoggedetarian here. I was one of the 5-6 sd kids and I credit getting into school where everyone else was like me with saving my life. If not literally, than saving anything recognizeable as a social existence that wouldn't have lead to real bad shit. Until I was middle of the road, I almost was a different species, and the kids, all of them, were viciously mean to me. As soon as I was with kids who were like me, my social problems dissipated and from there I could become socialized. So when I hear these conversations about mainstreaming different ability levels and how the high ability kids are the very ones who don't need help, I can only think of my circumstances and how desperately I needed exactly what ttaM is arguing against. Thank fucking god I was in Los Angeles, where that was an option.
My school was a smaller school of 600 on a campus of 2500. There wasn't big tension but not a lot of mixing, either.
Almost a quarter of my calculus students don't know what derivatives mean
Have you considered doing something about that?
I tried! I banged the drum pretty hard on it (at least for derivatives, I could have done a better job on it with integrals) and most of the students got it. But you can't actually get away with failing people who know how to take derivatives just because they don't know what they mean. And the students know that and are pretty good at ignoring anything that isn't a recipe for manipulating some string of symbols.
I kid. I've taken calc and I recall not worry about anything conceptual.
I was one of the 5-6 sd kids
. . .
Not to disagree with your point, but taken literally that claim works out to the range between being one of the 20 smartest people in CA and being the smartest person in North America.
OK, that part's not literal. I pulled it from the comments above as a way to categorize the top end. I can readily think of about a dozen people who are smarter than I am.
Although I'm better than Anand at some things.
I mean, not to talk trash or anything, but he didn't really do half the blogging at FTA.
I can readily think of about a dozen people who are smarter than I am.
Some of them are absolute whizzes at statistics.
If I'm doing it right 5sd should be roughly saying the top 150 in the US in your grade, while 6sd means the best person in the US in two grades.
Nope, error, the numbers I was looking at were out of a 100 not out of 1.
Unless I'm reading it wrong, wikipedia says that 4sd is 1/16K, 5sd is 1/1.74M, 6sd is 1/507M.
It looks like there's about 50M school kids in the US, so call it 4.5M per grade level.
So 5sd would be top 5 in the country for a given grade level, 6sd would be the best kid to come through the school system in 100 years.
It thins out quickly at that point in the distribution (as those of us who have read, Soon I Will Be Invinvible should remember).
If I'm doing the numbers right this time, 3sd is top 6K in the country in your grade, 4sd is top 150 in the US in your grade, 5sd is top 1 or 2 in the US in your grade, and 6sd is best in the US in 200 years.
Soon I Will Be Invincible. I don't think anybody aspires to be "Invinvible."
Anyway I had ran these numbers at some point before, and hadn't picked 4 to 5 out of a hat. But it's the 2-3 range that's most relevant to gifted student policy.
I think the argument there is, assuming that there were reasonable academic resources for you in the non-magnet school, that the damage to the school you were pulled out of and to the remaining students there from losing its top students would be greater than the social damage to those of the top students who had trouble functioning in a non-magnet school.
I get stuck on 'assuming there were reasonable academic resources', which there often don't seem to be. On the straight social functioning argument, I don't know -- I was miserable in grade school, non-tracked, and not miserable in a magnet high school, but I wasn't particularly bullied in grade school, and I might have just gotten to a less miserable age. And I really don't have a good sense of how to assess the damage to the school I would have attended from losing a couple of its better potential students.
That's funny. A couple years ahead of me, we did have a kid with a 210 IQ. Now he's a university professor just like everybody else, so I can't see that it did him all that much good.
If I'd read this thread would I have found the part where people started taking IQ seriously?
and 6sd is best in the US in 200 years
Definitely Megan.
Nah, I don't think standard deviation is being used of IQ literally.
Oh. What distribution are people talking about, then?
Some vague and undefined (but probably not actually meaningless) sense of being academically out ahead of ones peers in one or all subjects.
Thinking about it, I was pretty much always been in schools segregated by ability, some private, some public. The exception was elementary school, where we basically segregated by race (were there lots of Mexican kids? Yes. Did the white kids hang out with them? No.). I've always felt like a mediocre at best player in a world with a lot of smarter people around, but maybe if I was in the high school where kids can't subtract, I would feel like a genius.
In principle, though, I'm very sympathetic to Ttam's idea that we really just shouldn't care about the top 5%.
Not "distribution people." Never mind.
296: so we're talking about being as many as six standard deviations away from the mean of... an undefined, unmeasured distribution?
You people are out of the gifted program.
In my case, and I know my case is just my own, I wasn't doing the school any good by crying in the corner as I re-read their library for the severalth time. (And that was a gifted program.) Unless they were getting some utility from focusing hostility on me, I wasn't offering the school and other students much. I wasn't even getting good grades.
For me, it wasn't until I was with the few hundred smartest kids in Los Angeles that I got what I needed and offered anything to the school either. I certainly would wish that everyone got all the resources they need. But for me, that meant tracking, and I tried it both ways so I know. I also know that I wasn't in any less danger of failing my life (drugs, disorders, suicide) as an outlier on the top than outliers at the bottom are.
Strict 'go to the closest school' would, I think, not improve the worst schools much, but would level stuff out between the excellent and the okay. (Guessing based on residential patterns.)
You don't think it would lead to a greater degree of upper middle class people sending their kids to private schools and greater class segregation? You're about as pro-public school as UMC parents get, yet I suspect if the options were bottom end NYC public high school or private school or move, you'd end up doing one of the latter two. And when you did, if you chose move, you'd probably go for excellent rather than ok.
ttaM's idea that ability tracking = racial segretation is insane. Whether it is good overall, I don't know. I suspect that if the percentage of the kind of kids that end up in honors/ap type tracks is high enough, then eliminating tracking might help. However, as someone who went to a private high school with no tracking other than math and second languages, my experience is that for most of the less skilled/motivated students it would not work out well. What happened is that the teachers ignored them. No class prejudice involved, since the kids in question had the same sort of class distribution as the rest of the school (full spectrum of the top quintile with a bias towards the upper end).
Catching up on the thread, I read 271, thought "I'm going to sound like an ass when I nitpick Megan on statistics, aren't I?", and then kept reading and discovered that we're all a bunch of asses.
In principle, though, I'm very sympathetic to Ttam's idea that we really just shouldn't care about the top 5%.
That's the wise way to do policy, and probably the choice I'd make if I had to allocate resources. But I am also as sure as I can be that it would have killed me specifically, so I can't really get behind that argument.
301: Still, that's a story about switching schools from one where you were bullied to one where you weren't. It's plausible that the tracked student body in the new school is what made it better, but it's also possible that you just got away from the particular kids who were giving you a hard time, and that you would have been okay in a different, non-tracked, school as well as in your actual new school.
303: yet I suspect if the options were bottom end NYC public high school or private school or move, you'd end up doing one of the latter two.
Bottom-end? That's probably right. But residential segregation would probably mean that the school my kids were zoned for would be okay rather than bottom end.
Another possibility is just growing older.
I was pretty unhappy as a white-minority kid with bad english; when I was 11 I started working and getting stoned all the time. I stopped being so unhappy, as I now had social roles.
You never know about the roads not taken, I guess.
Having spent many summers around kids who are for the first time somewhere that being smart is normal, the kind of reaction that Megan is relating seems very common in my experience. I don't think it's just a question of avoiding bullies, I think it's an issue of feeling normal for the first time.
Why the bad English? (immigrant from someplace?)
kept reading and discovered that we're all a bunch of asses.
I get randomly pedantic sometimes.
At least this wasn't as bad as me arguing with H-G about whether you could map a ruler to the real numbers
(If Heebie is reading, I was mulling over that argument two days ago and still found it interested -- which was ultimately unfortunate because I really don't think it's worth re-visiting.)
Fine, but I'd say put money towards helping out the majority, not making sure you math geeks get kissed before Age 25.
309: Sure, I remember feeling like that when I went to high school. But I also know people who seem to be just as bright as I am who didn't mind non-magnet schools at all.
311: Fine, don't reward my nosiness.
Why can't kids just seek out the intellectual company they crave outside of school? Why, back in my dad you could call BBSs, meet like-minded (and highly intelligent!) computer enthusiasts, and learn useful skills, like owning Tymnet nodes, or opening FedEx boxes, or how to card more computers without getting caught. All these "magnet schools" and "academic tracks" and "academic resources" are going to lead kids down a terrible, terrible path.
What were you doing in your dad, Tweety?
Outside of a dad it's too bright to hack.
313: put money towards
Magnet schools don't necessarily cost any more than the regular schools -- the question is more whether the separation is good, harmless, or harmful.
Don't think so, though. My non-bullied sister with actual social skills went to the local school, didn't find much in either academics, friends or non-white people and switched to the magnet school. Twenty years later, my brother did the same (just this past January). Both blossomed.
They have social skills, so they would probably have made it through the a non-tracked program without going very wrong. But I didn't and don't think I could have. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I'm stating the case as I've thought it through.
The local school is a pretty good high school, too. I'm not comparing bad with excellent. I needed, specifically, not just good but the kind of excellent that people find offensive about siphoning off resources and smart kids.
316: Maybe we should start an Unfogged Outreach Program for the Cultivation of Exceptional Youth.
Born in CZ, came when I was 3, lived in low-rent neighborhoods near universities in Philly then Chicago.
The country code for CZ used to be 42. It is now hilariously 420, which became slang for reefer after 1993, too late for personal relevance.
They have social skills, so they would probably have made it through the a non-tracked program without going very wrong. But I didn't and don't think I could have. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I'm stating the case as I've thought it through.
What would have happened to you if you hadn't been in a special area with a special school you could go to? High school drop out? Suicide? Drug addiction?
Whhops, country code changed after 1993, son't know when slang changed.
Eh. We got the good teachers too, so that's a cost to other high schools.
Blossom is a smart lady.
Her brother went to my high school.
High school drop out? Suicide? Drug addiction?
That's my best guess. My parents might have pulled me, sent me to college.
This is making me think that either (a) I'm not as intelligent as all of you (b) I had better social skills (which seems very unlikely) or, I suppose, (c) individual experiences differ.
Like Tweety I found a group of intelligent kid through geeky activities (gaming, in my case), and I was lucky that it was a good group of people. I'm still friends with several of them (and, for whatever it matters, they're all smart but not necessarily brilliant or necessarily academically gifted. I ended up being the most academically inclined of the group, which isn't, I think, a coincidence, but isn't something that I could have predicted as a 15-year old).
But I suspect that if I hadn't found a core group of friends that I would have been lonely and mildly unhappy, but that I wouldn't have felt anywhere near as isolated as Megan did.
My school had some good teachers, but they were far from uniformly awesome. No one who was checked out all the way, and no one (other than a couple of gym teachers who taught Health) who wasn't fairly bright, but I remember more teachers I'd call bad than good.
330: Probably (c) -- like I said, I know plenty of people just as clever as I think I am who managed fine in local high schools.
330: I had a really fun group of friends in middle school. But I also got bullied a fair amount, there were fights there almost every day, and it wasn't a very pleasant environment, good friends notwithstanding. High school was pretty great, but for the first year I was a lot more socially isolated than I had been in middle school.
In general, I doubt it's all that common that the relationship between having a good social group and being around people of comparable intelligence is one-to-one; I expect there's some correlation, but lots of other things are important too.
259: Comity on all points. The administration had a lot of challenges, because it was Crackton in the late 1980s, but they could have done a lot more to make connections accross and through the student body.
And of course, to make it explicit, not treating students like inmates (the school building easily passes for a small prison), but instead giving them some sollective power over their educational experience, would have allowed the students to make a huge difference on their own.
305
That's the wise way to do policy, and probably the choice I'd make if I had to allocate resources. ...
Actually it is a stupid way to do policy, the best students should get the most resources because that's where you get the best return. Which of course is why the best students rather than the worst students are selected for graduate school.
298
In principle, though, I'm very sympathetic to Ttam's idea that we really just shouldn't care about the top 5%.
And then they obtain power you will have plead with them not to take out their bad school memories on the bottom 95%.
Which of course is why the best students rather than the worst students are selected for graduate school.
James, if I may point to myself as a glaring counter-example.
338: defined, you know, post-hoc, however.
337: the best students should get the most resources because that's where you get the best return. Which of course is why the best students rather than the worst students are selected for graduate school.
Jesus, James, for someone who has demonstrated superior logical prowess on toy problems you certainly come up with some incredible howlers when the reasoning turns to the world as it actually is.
I thought grad students were picked based on being smart enough to do the work, but not smart enough to realize how much easier life is if you earn more than ten bucks an hour.
342: Easily compatible with "get the best return", however.
337 Actually it is a stupid way to do policy, the best students should get the most resources because that's where you get the best return.
Bullshit. On the margin, you do a lot better spending resources on people who aren't going to learn things on their own.
All the real smart people have fucked off and left the rest of us alone. They are probably hiding in Scotland.
The top five percent of school students in this country end up getting the most resource courtesy of a tertiary education system that is both selective based on grades and test scores and where the most selective institutions spend a lot more per student than the ones lower down the food chain. Add the fact that quite a few people don't end up going to college at all, while among the top five percent a very high proportion goes to grad school, and I'm pretty sure that the top five percent gets a lot more resources
Or Delaware. I doing know anything about Delaware and that makes me suspicious. It isn't very far away. It's kind of like we're not supposed to notice.
Delaware definitely gets far more than its share of resources.
It seems to me (judging from what I heard about Berkeley high) that UMC parents in the US are perfectly capable of only supporting *part* of a public school (the parts that have their kids) while letting the other parts suffer.
Lots of people have this impression and I'm not sure how true it is. A friend of mine certainly thought this while he was getting his teaching credential until he worked there for some extended teaching program related activity and revised his view to: there's actually a lot of support for all levels, but the disparities are so great that you don't really realize it from afar. He was not teaching the honors kids. So, uh, there's an anecdote.
(I went there, but my experience as a student was so specific to my track - beyond a couple of classes early on - that I'm not going to claim anything from it. I doubt a private or suburban school would have been any better for me.)
344
Bullshit. On the margin, you do a lot better spending resources on people who aren't going to learn things on their own.
In a very poor country I think it is clear you get more return from spending resources on smart children. The same amount of money will teach more smart kids to read (because they learn easier) and the benefit per child will be greater as well. I didn't say anything about marginal returns, presumeably they decrease as spending on smart kids increases so that at some point it is worthwhile to spend some money educating dumb kids as well. I doubt this will reach the point where you are rationally spending more total money on the dumb kids however, at least absent near infinite resources for education.
346
... and I'm pretty sure that the top five percent gets a lot more resources
Which is as it should be.
What's it like not knowing anything, James? Just floating in a sea of total ignorance about any actual facts about the world, and randomly deducing shit?
For fucks sake. What's up with you idiots letting James in here(for ever since I've been reading) , could you not find a member of the klan to post racist bullshit all-over your comments section.
I doubt this will reach the point where you are rationally spending more total money on the dumb kids however, at least absent near infinite resources for education.
any elaboration for this shitshow?
350: This is so nonsensical. The situation you're describing has historically been the case everywhere, and even today is not unknown, and what does it produce? A broad mass of people with no education at all who are incapable of contributing to a complex society on any but the most marginal level.
Furthermore, in the system you describe, as it is virtually always practiced in the real world, how it actually works out is that upper-class boys receive all the educational resources, while the most intelligent people in the lower classes, plus all the girls, receive nothing. You're basically talking about something that's not that different from a slave society.
354
any elaboration ...
It doesn't make sense (at least in economic terms) to spend a lot resources training people for jobs they have no aptitude for and won't actually be performing. Lots of people are not suited for an academic career path and should spend their efforts elsewhere.
You are ill-advised to pay for three years of law school if you have little chance of passing the bar exam or succeeding in a legal career. And this is also an unwise investment if society as a whole is paying the bills.
And yet that's not what you advocated above:
I doubt this will reach the point where you are rationally spending more total money on the dumb kids however, at least absent near infinite resources for education.
276, 283, 285: If you use Chebyshev's Inequality, 4 standard deviations is less than 1/16th of the population, 5 standard deviations are less than 1/25th, 6 standard deviations are less than 1/36th.
If you assume the tails are equal, then you get a probability of being above the mean by at least 5 or 6 standard deviations as 1/50 and 1/72 respectively. Even the most extreme version of Megan's claim, that she's in the top 1/72 of the population, hardly seems an unbelievable claim for a highly educated professional.
Are you all assuming a normal distribution of talent? Standardized scores like IQ are calibrated to normality, but that's not necessarily the case for the underlying attributes.