More stats:
It looks like minority students are more likely to be homeschooled, which would seem to be a direct response to public school shortcomings.
Usually it has to do with parents not wanting their kids to learn the world is round and that other people are people.
Chicken or egg, though? School districts would have to start somewhere, and I suspect it would be easier overall to start paying more, and THEN become more selective and run off the poorer teachers, than to become selective first, and try to attract quality applicants to a job that is simultaneously low-paying, highly selective and requires high performance.
And as far as homeschooling goes, I have NEVER known someone who took to homeschooling their children because of the educational inadequacy of the local schools. They’ve always, without exception, been members of the very conservative and vocal Christian right, and are homeschooling their kids because they can’t wrap their head around the idea of schools implementing pragmatic policies WRT teen sex, pregnancy and homosexual students. They seem more concerned that the schools don’t actively condemn and castigate those students, than whether or not the schools are academically good or not.
I mean, they’re AGHAST at the idea that public schools allow openly gay students, or that they might actually acknowledge that teenagers have sex and take prudent steps to prevent pregnancy and disease. It’s all about the religious/social aspects for them.
(which in a roundabout way, is what tnetennba is saying I suppose)
Whatever the reason for that trend, it ain’t because people dislike their local schools: satisfaction with local schools is at an all-time high.
Republicans, and to a lesser extent Democrats, have made hay out of attacking public schools. In general I see blaming schools for racial and socioeconomic gaps in education as akin to blaming pediatricians in smoggy cities for rates of asthma: it’s a convenient way to avoid social responsibility for children living in poverty and racism. Certainly there are things schools can do to decrease the achievement gap; certainly there are schools that have a toxic culture. But the problems children in poverty face are far bigger than what can be fixed in a classroom, and if we’re serious, we won’t send in SWAT teams to high-poverty schools. If we’re serious, we’ll enact social policies that meaningfully reduce childhood poverty.
Not to be the grammar police, but it bugs me when I see it in three posts running. It’s ‘there,’ the adverb, as in ‘over there, in a box, on the shelf,’ not ‘their,’ the third-person plural possessive pronoun, as in ‘based on their policies.’
Lord Feldon has already showed you a graph that demonstrates an increase in the percentage of American children who attend public schools. Here it is again, in case you missed it first time around.
And your own assertion is preposterous. Pointing to an increase in home-schooling, and suggesting that this shows that the “trend is moving against public schools”—especially when you’ve already been given statistics showing that the percentage of students using public schools is growing—is a bit like pointing to a growth in the number of people buying Ferraris, and arguing that the trend is moving against Honda and Toyota.
The loop is one the right has been using for at least twenty years. 1. Campaign relentlessly against a public service (schools, welfare, health care subsidies, etc.), 2. Use the inevitable change in public opinion in response to #1 as further evidence to abandon public service.
Why do people say this? There’s no teacher shortage, except where there is–Urban and rural, special ed, bilingual and STEM. All these areas have terrible shortages. And a large number of applicants doesn’t mean there isn’t a shortage–if you get 5 applications for a chemistry position and none of them are remotely qualified to teach the course, so you hire the one that’s the least bad, that’s education being affected by a shortage. And this happens everywhere.
You seem to feel that “field” is immutable. It’s not. For one thing, lots of people who major in the humanities can go to law school or business school, so it’s not like they don’t have options. And if we paid teachers better, more people would apply to those programs.
Its’ not “are there breathing adults happy to get a job at $32K”. It’s “At $32K are we getting enough high quality, well-educated, hard-working people to do this job?”
If being a doctor had a starting salary of $32K and a mid-career salary of $50k, do you really think all the same–hell, hardly any of the same–people would be doctors? And do you you think the doctors we had – the ones that flunked into med school when they couldn’t get into the more lucrative degrees–would be the same quality?
Then you must have a pretty limited circle. I know people who homeschool because either they or their kids live a life which requires a more flexible schedule. For example celebrities. Athletes. Two homeschooling families I know do it because of their kids sports.
And then some parents also do it because they work on the road and take their kids with them. Ex. truckdrivers.
I have known many homeschoolers who do it for a variety of reasons. Yes, religious choice is #1 and believe it or not - even some wiccans choose homeschooling for that reason. But other choices include frustration with the schools, the desire to not have their kids being taught on an assembly line, and the desire for their kids to become free thinkers (ex. the “unschooling movement”).
Remember homeschooling took off originally as part of the hippie 60’s counterculture “back to the earth” movement.
I know a lot of homeschoolers, but none who do it for religious instruction or because they are scared of sex education. I know those types exist, but according to one of my links they make up only about a third of homeschoolers.
To those who bash homeschoolers.
Tell me, just how much time do you spend on your kids education even though they are in public schools?
I can tell you TONS!
With my own kids you spend alot of time as it is on helping them with their homework. I swear the lesson plans are “take this home and have your parents teach it to you”. Honestly, my kid has come home either totally lost or confused on a subject and I end up teaching it. The teachers do NOT check for understanding. In my day teachers kept on a subject, pounding it into our heads until we understood it. Nowadays they give out the assignment and have the kids take it home and by MAGIC it comes home complete and THEY take all the credit.
Quick story. One time my son brought a spelling assignment home and he was clueless on it. I was getting damn tired of going over spelling every night and I emailed the teacher about it. She said flat out that she didnt have time to teach spelling and gave me some tips on how I should teach it. Yep, she was testing over a subject she didnt even teach! Well I knew damn well teachers in other district found the time and I took that email to the principal.
Somehow that teacher quickly found the time to teach spelling.
I know plenty of parents who have paid tutors for their kids.
But yet the teachers take all the credit for the learning?
If we parents ever went on strike and refused to help our kids with homework, just see how things would go with test scores.
So since I end up teaching the stuff anyways, why not just homeschool?
I keep asking myself what happened since I went to school. I went to high school in a large public school, in a very large suburb of L.A., and then in a slightly more affluent smaller suburb. In both places, I ran across the occasional really lousy teacher, but they were a very small minority.
Now, granted, I was one of those AP-track students, and this was over 30 years ago, so I’d have less of a ‘lousy’ sampling anyway, but literally almost to a man/woman these were committed and knowledgeable people. We had the same 30-plus-to-one ratios, and textbooks that would be at best no better than what’s available now. We didn’t have a whole lot of excess funding, the pavement would go cracked for a while until the district got up the money to do something about it, and there wasn’t a whole lot of new construction (this last I judge from the perspective of well after my HS career).
Maybe the ratio of salary to cost-of-living went up since then, but they weren’t really any better-paid either. I don’t know, maybe I was just lucky. Anyone else from my age group that could share their perceptions from that time? We’re talking late '70’s, early '80’s here.
Who’s bashing them? I’m certainly not. Most of us have simply been pointing out the unwarranted conclusions that adaher has been drawing from homeschooling statistics.
Also, i’m not sure that the lesson you seem to be taking from your argument is quite the right one.
You say, “If we parents ever went on strike and refused to help our kids with homework, just see how things would go with test scores.” You’re probably right, but instead of ragging on teachers, why not place some of the blame where it really belongs: on the obsession with standardized testing.
There are plenty of teachers who would be happy to go over concepts in detail, and spend time in class making sure that students were actually learning. But one of the problems of the tests is that, in many cases, they require teachers to pack huge amounts of material into a term, and to jump quickly from one test topic to the next, without taking the time necessary to ensure that the students actually grasp the concepts and ideas. And needing to cram so much in means that they end up sending a lot of it home, and leaving parents to oversee part of the learning process.
I teach at a university, so i don’t have to deal with the standardized testing bullshit when i design my syllabus. I can spend as much or little time as i want on things i think are important. But i have done consulting work on federal government grant projects designed to improve the teaching of American history in high schools, and i’ve seen the challenges faced by teachers who are constantly being harangued by principals and administrators and boards of education to pump out the test materials.
I also happen to believe that many American schoolkids, especially at the elementary level, are given far too much homework. I don’t have kids, but i have friends with kids, and the amount of homework some of them get on a regular basis is appalling. And it has exactly the effect you describe: they get overwhelmed, and the parents end up giving them loads of help or, in some cases, doing the actual homework for them.
There have been quite a lot of articles in the field of education, and in mainstream newspapers and magazines, over the past few years about the homework burden.
My Daughter’s Homework Is Killing Me (Atlantic Monthly)
How much homework is too much? (Mother Jones)
Homework could have an effect on kids’ health. Should schools ban it? (Washington Post)
You can find plenty more with a bit of searching. Not everyone agrees that kids get too much homework, but at the very least, there is considerable debate over whether more actually leads to better outcomes.
I don’t want to trust my childhood memories too much, but when i was in elementary school in the late 1970s (not in the US, though), i don’t remember having very much homework at all. Even in high school (which, in Australia, is grades 7-12), it did not seem to be overwhelming. Sure, there were busy nights, and there were times when i didn’t complete it all, but there was never the sense that homework was a major impediment to having fun, or that it was a crushing burden.
I might not be the ideal example; i was a bit lazy when it came to homework. It could be that some other students spent many hours more per week than i did. But i don’t think so. I went to a (public) boarding school, and we all had to sit and do our homework together, so we all had a pretty good idea of how much each person was working.
Yeah, having AP classes probably meant you had the best of the best teachers. AP students are motivated to learn so the teachers spend little time dealing with disruptive students and classroom management issues. Compare that to the teachers teaching first year history.
Fancy brand new facilities are nice but dont mean the kids are going to learn any better. Kansas City Missouri spent over a billion dollars in the 90’s to improve their schools and it didnt help one bit.
And goddamn what a Christmas present they gave to libertarians, didn’t they? There are two different lessons one can draw from this amazingly-popular libertarian cautionary tale:
- Schools don’t need money!
- Corrupt/incompetent officials can stymie progress.
The second lesson is far more reasonable and far more in keeping with facts. But the first lesson props up an anti-tax, anti-public-ed dogma, so that’s the one most libertarians go with.
It’s true, fancy new facilities don’t mean kids are going to learn better. But, everything else being equal, a student with access to a climate-controlled building with a library stocked with quality new trade books, access to appropriate technology whenever the teacher has need of it for a lesson plan, high-speed Internet access, and a state-of-the-art lab is going to learn more effectively than a student in a school without climate control, with a small outdated library, a single computer lab for 500 students, spotty Internet access, and little or no scientific equipment.
This is not rocket science. This is true for any workplace. All things being equal, under which set of conditions would you be more productive at your job?
A small example: I teach in a school with wonderful staff, wonderful administration, wonderful kids, wonderful parents. It’s kind of a dream school.
For some reason, our building can either have heat or air conditioning, but not both, and it requires maintenance to come from central office to switch us between the two climate controls, so it only happens twice a year: in October they turn off the AC and turn heat on, and in April they do the reverse.
There are classes downstairs, north-facing classes, that shiver for much of October and April. Their kids wear coats for most of the day. But that’s not my problem. My classroom faces southeast and has probably 400 square feet of windows, almost floor-to-ceiling.
Are you familiar with how greenhouses work?
From October to April, I have all my windows open and an electric fan blowing. It can be 28 degrees outside, it doesn’t matter: from about 10:00 until about 1:00, my classroom is a freakin’ sauna, 80 degrees or higher.
Now, I do my best to teach my lovely kids how to compare equivalent fractions on a number line. But are you trying to tell me that those poor melting kids, sweating and exhausted from our sweltering classroom, wouldn’t benefit from an upgrade to facilities that let me keep our classroom at 65-75 degrees all year long?
Would YOU function well if your office were at 80-90 degrees for about three hours a day?
I didn’t have all AP classes. That would work out to about a dozen classes in HS. Most of the general subject stuff was regular classes. As for math, I was a year ahead, but I was still in regular classes, just with people a year ahead of me.
I’ll speak as a parent who is on his fourth child in High School with the oldest having preceded her by 15 years. Mostly pretty good teachers, a few amazingly great ones, and one or two poor to malignantly bad ones over the whole run.
Dealt with fads along the way as education goes through trends: all phonics to whole language and back to a reasonable balance, so on. The best teachers quietly buffered the worst of the faddish edicts from administrators.
But kids all in known good school districts with real estate taxes at a rate able to fund it. Many with two parent intact families and if anything over-involved parents. Non-intact families usually also had two highly involved parents even if they avoided being at the same events. Few parents who objected to actual science being taught and who want creationism given equal footing. Dealing with helicopter parents may be a challenge but it is a different sort of problem than many other teachers have to deal with.
So those of us, like your parents, mine, and my wife and I, who are have the resources and willingness to invest in living in a better school district, continue to have good quality education available for our children as before. Even if there is excessive testing involved.
There is however, just like for wealth, income, and power, great inequality in the system, of various sorts, for various causes. I do not want my kids to have any less than they have had, but I do appreciate that other children are systematically not getting the same opportunities.
Why cant they just put in some window unit air conditioners? My sons school is a retrofitted elementary school where they took out the old system and just replaced it with window units.
That is the same in our district.
I dont know if yours is the same but along with those higher taxes, they also slap fees on everything and charge tuition (that’s what I call it). You pay for darn near every class outside the core (ex. $200 to be in choir) and even then their is a big book fee. If you want your kid to play on the soccer team and get playing time, you WILL be part of the booster clubs and donate lots of time and money. Almost every week the PTA or some other group sends you a request for more money or help with some sort of fundraiser. Spending over $1,000 a year is not unheard of.
One big controversy we have is that not every elementary school in the district is the same. Some are redlined (that’s what I call the mini-public yet private schools) for rich areas, some are not. The rich ones have well run PTA’s that raise all kinds of money (ex. for a new gym floor) while others struggle and their is a big push to make the richer schools “share”. My son’s school raised about $20,000 a year and each teacher gets somewhere like $200 each for incidentals. We also pay for any entertainment brought in, class field trips, and other improvements.