I’ll bet you guys think of Canada as being more ‘progressive’ than the U.S., but this is one area where the U.S. is definitely ahead of us. While you guys argue about whether there should be a minute of silent prayer in school, we have an entire publically funded separate school system that has religious classes and nuns and all that.
As for private schools, we have oodles of them. Here’s a list. Most of them are eligible for public funding. There are Chinese schools, Islamic schools, Christian academies, Montessori schools, etc.
These private schools do not include the separate school system, the Francophone school system, charter schools, or home schooling. I believe the Francophone schools and charter schools get full public funding, as do the Catholic schools. Home schooling also gets public funds (last year, parents who home school got $1272 per child, plus a 50% reimbursement of tuition costs for special courses).
Charter schools are interesting in that they are public schools that decide to focus on a specific aspect of education (science, fine arts, etc). They have to get governmental approval, and then they get full public funding. Charter schools can’t have a religious affiliation.
And that’s probably one of the worst statistics you can use, because teacher salaries are highly dependent on region (living expenses being higher in some areas than others), and on union negotiations, and on difficulty in finding teachers.
I’m willing to bet there is very little correlation between teacher salaries and educational performance, unless it’s a confounding variable with something that really does matter (ie teachers make more in very rich areas, where other conditions are conducive to good child performance).
After all, what is the argument? That if you pay teachers more, they’ll try harder? Or that if you pay them more, you’ll get better teachers because people will go into teaching that would otherwise go into other fields? Or what?
I don’t think teacher salaries are generally that low, especially considering that they get summers off. I don’t see evidence of a massive teacher shortage. I don’t see private schools, which exist in a more pure marketplace, choosing to pay teachers huge salaries to get better teachers. In fact, I think most private school teachers make less. What I do see in private schools is teacher salaries being tied more to performance.
But whenever you bring merit pay into a discussion on teacher’s salaries, the teacher’s unions recoil in horror.
The Catholic separate school system (which, incidentally, takes non-Catholic students, and many do choose to go) is an artifact of the manner in which Canada was founded - as a compromise between French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) interests. Providing funded Catholic education - as well as allowing French language services, the French civil law system, etc. - were themselves artifacts of the Quebec Act 1763, and were critical elements in allowing Canada to ever exist. It’s an antiquated thing now but quite frankly it’d cost more to combine them and it’s a voluntary thing, so nobody cares enough to change it.
Until 30-40 years ago or so the non-Catholic public school system was openly Protestant, not secular. That’s changed recently.
Funding went down because of Proposition 13. Schools opening in poorer areas would not be a cause, since school funding in California for the most part is funneled through the state and redistributed to school districts based on a formula which is based on funding patterns a few decades old. My school district is screwed by this, and it can’t change because LA, which has a large block of the legislature, does very well with the current formula.
The counterargument to funding as a cause of decreasing test scores is the increasing number of immigrants and non-English speaking students. There is certainly some truth to this, but the problem does not go away without resources.
I think to a certain extent the OP is a straw man - no one says that only throwing money at education will improve it. Starving it, however, hurts.
You misread the RAND Study. Funding for schools did not go down in California. Funding for schools increased (per pupil spending was about $6000 per student in 1979 and in 2003 it is a little over $8000, in constant dollars), but funding did not increase as much as per pupil spending in the rest of the nation. The study simpy reinforces my argument – throwing more money at education does not lead to better outcomes.
Actuall, BrainGlutton seems to believe exactly that. I said that increasing funding for education will do nothing to help the kids in another thread, and he opened this one to have a fuller discussion.
What I believe is, other factors being constant, spending more money-per-pupil on a given school or school system will produce better-educated graduates than less money. Which is the conventional wisdom, and something I’ve never heard contradicted outside this board. Obviously, of course, there are countless other factors in play.
That is changing the terms of the debate, then. There are no instances where other factors can be controlled. You asked if putting more money into schools makes them more effective. The answer is clearly no.
The conventional wisdom is often wrong. The idea that giving schools more money and they will perform better is often mocked among education policy makers, but the teachers’ unions do a fine job of convincing the public that the only way to fix schools is to throw more money at them.
Of course, and we can never get rid of those factors. Furthermore, those factors play a much larger role in student success than funding, as the examples show. So our education policy debates should not be over funding levels (which they usually are), but instead they should concern addressing those other factors.
:rolleyes: It might make you feel good to believe that, but your story doesn’t necessarily offer that conclusion. Do you have any real cites, besides just relying on the fact that “blacks don’t value education” seems to be the meme of the millenneum?
Also, to add a little more substance to my response, if I were forced to whip up a glib, one-phrase explanation for poor black student performance, it would be: low-expectations from all around. And here’s a couple of things to actually back that up. Of course, that means the answer still is “it’s a cultural problem”, except I’m referring the our national culture, something I actually have a stake it, not an alien culture I can unproductively dump blame upon.
:rolleyes: No. Actually it makes me rather sad. And angry.
“…story…”?
:rolleyes: My post included no story. There was a cite of an actual experiment conducted in Kansas City and a comment at the end by me.
“Blacks don’t value education”?
:rolleyes: Why do you say that? Or are you implying that I said it, which I didn’t. There are many blacks and people of all color who place a very high value on education. And you know that, their children do well. And there are plenty of groups, usually sharing the common denominator of poverty, who do not value education and the children of whom do poorly generation after generation. But to too great a degree, poor black communities have the biggest problem. Although children from all poor communities don’t do as well as children from wealthier areas, blacks are at the bottom. Statistically they do the worst. (See the Thernstrom book below.)
“Do you have any real cites?”?
:rolleyes: Given that that about 90% of my reply was a cite, with a link to an in-depth analysis, maybe this will help you.
If you’d like to learn (more) (something) about the racial gap in education I suggest No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom. You can get it here or at Amazon.
Okay, sorry for assuming you were saying “blacks don’t value education” but that cite only proves that spending more money per student doesn’t raise test scores, and says nothing about anybody devaluing education. The writer of that summary even suggested that the problem was with the structure of the education system. The conclusion that anyone devalues education is something I hear all the time, but the evidence that causes someone to jump to that conclusion is never unambiguous. How could you accurately measure someone’s lack of value towards education without getting it mixed up with plain ignorance about what makes a good education. One behavior that gets thrown out as an example of devaluing education is a lack of involvement by parents in the school itself. It may seem obvious you to to distrust the school’s ability to and interest in giving your child the best education without you checking up on it, but can’t you understand that another parent might not realize that public schools aren’t some perfectly efficient institution with their child’s best interest at heart, full of intimidatingly competent professionals who would prefer that parents get out of their way so that they can teach their kids? Some educators realize that and are trying to drill into parents’ heads that they have to be a squeaky wheel to get their kids the grease.
I haven’t read that, yet (it’s on my list for my next library trip. Thanks for the tip.), but from the excerpts, it seems that they draw the same conclusion about the racial gap that most educational scholars are these days; that low expectations from everyone involved are the main culprit in causing low performance.
I don’t disagree, it’s just that I think attributing the problem to “everyone” involved just about guarantee’s that nothing will be done. I think we should all expect much, much more of our schools, particulalry those is the impoverished inner cities. I also think we should call to task the very communities, including the school administrators, who continue to fail these kids. One chapter in the Therstrom book looks at some successful charter schools in some of the worst areas. Some of them are doing truly miraculous work and I think there is much to learn from them.
I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts on the book after you read it.
The Kansas City Experiment is a great case history. It should lay to rest the idea that money is the answer. I’ve been surpried that a thread constructed to look at that very issue has pretty much ignored it. Oh well…
Of course there are. If you wanted to run a controlled experiment, you could pick a dozen similar inner-city schools, a dozen similar suburban schools, a dozen rural schools; divide each set in half, increase funding for the test group (and changing nothing else about the schools directly) while leaving it as is for the control group.
Freaknomics weighs in on this to some extent and finds that the absolute biggest predictor of educational success is the family’s involvement and concern about education. The actual school (and by extension the amount of money spent per student) was relatively unimportant.
What they did was dissect the statistics from the Chicago school system. Apparently, some time recently, Chicago switched to a lottery system. When you compare the kids who got into “good” schools to kids who didn’t, obviously the kids in the good schools performed better.
But, the authors took it one step further. They compared the kids who got into the good schools to the kids who did not get into the good schools but did apply to the good schools. In other words, they looked at the kids who came from families that seemed to take an interest and try to get their kids into the better schools. When they looked at this comparison, the disparity all but disappeared.
Their conclusions were that in the end, the actual school that the kid goes to is unimportant, but a kid that is raised in a family that cares enough about education to try to get their kid into the good school have the best chance at success.
I’m seriously simplifying their study, by the way, but it makes for great reading.
This really is the key and I don’t think you’ll find a person who is or was in the teaching field dispute this. The question has always been how to get the students from families that don’t value education to make an effort in school.
I am currently in college to obtain my K-6 license. Many of my classmates are smart, competent folks. But there are plenty of morons, huge honking morons, who are going to get their teaching certificate and become tomorrow’s teachers. This includes the woman who couldn’t tell me a single fact about the Revolutionary War (she asked me who the president was during the war), and would have included the woman who declared that she hates to read, except that she, blessedly, dropped out of the program.
As I see it, teaching is a dump profession in a lot of ways. Folks who are academically minded are discouraged from going into teaching. One of my professors nearly sneered at me for wanting to be a teacher: she told me that with my academic skills, I ought to be a professor instead. And she’s in the education department. I’ve read anecdotes saying that advisors and counselors steer women into teaching if they’re not very academic.
This is insane. We need to have some of our best academic minds in the classroom, modeling academic rigor and passion to students. We need to find a way of making this happen.
I think we need to do several things:
-We should phase out teachers with less than a master’s degree.
-We should require intense rigor in education departments: someone who doesn’t know that there was no President during the American Revolution should not be able to pass the entrance exam.
-We should give teachers a greater degree of autonomy in the classroom: once we’ve set the strict requirements in place, let’s give the teachers the power that comes with that responsibility.
-We should pay teachers a salary commensurate with what we’re asking of them.
-We should put a maximum class size cap of 20.
-We should fund education on a statewide basis, not an individual district basis.
I’ve posted this before, but in the math and sciences there is a HUGE population of underemployed people called postdocs. Tens of thousands of people making 35K per year, with limited benefits, who have 10-30 post high school years of education. Every year a whole lot of them realize that they aren’t going to become tenured professors (only about 7% ever do) and have to find an alternative career.
Offer them 80K per year to teach high school and many would take it. I would have a few years ago (and to toot my own horn, I would have made a fantastic teacher). Sure, they would have to be somewhat trained, but these are people very used to getting up in front of people and teaching their research, so retraining is very possible.
I mentioned this idea to my mom and aunt, both teachers, and both laughed. “Yeah right. The teacher’s lobby would love that!”
It goes both ways, teachers certainly deserve more money. But, the kids also deserve better teachers.