Surely, Urbanredneck, SURELY you’re not suggesting we just throw money at the problem!
The simple answer is because your kids end up all kinds of fucked up if they don’t get the social interaction with their peers that they get at a more traditional school. Not necessarily in terms of being almost autistic or anything, but just sheltered and kind of weird.
Every homeschooled kid I’ve ever known, and every adult I’ve ever known who was homeschooled had this really eerie pop-culture and life experience gap from everyone else, and it’s really weird.
I think the reasons probably vary a lot by part of the country- in the South, it’s primarily a religious/evangelical thing. Elsewhere, it probably varies more.
You have NO IDEA of all the clubs, organized groups, and activities homeschooled kids participate in. Around here they also have their own sports league. Ok, maybe they dont know who Beyonce is, dont know how to twerk, dont cyberbully, and dont demand the latest designer clothes - big deal. Hell that’s a good thing.
Lets not forget they also didnt grow up dealing with bullying either and are not burned out after 12 years of public school.
Here is an article where they proved homeschooled kids actually did 15%-30% better on standardized tests.
Here is an article titled The World’s 15 Most Extraordinary Homeschoolers
If those people are “weird” so what?
You know what they say about an attorney who represents himself.
As far as the standardized test thing is concerned, here’s some interesting stuff on that very topic, looking at SAT and ACT scores:
(Rather long, but worth the read.) It posits that homeschooled students do less well at math, for a series of complicated reasons you’ll have to read yourself to find out. Here’s one of the points I found interesting:
I want to expand on my previous snarky answer. There are several parts to why your solution isn’t being done:
- Pragmatically, it’d be very difficult. Our rooms have 15’ ceilings or so, meaning a small window unit air conditioner wouldn’t suffice for the whole room. The windows themselves are short and wide, a nonstandard size that wouldn’t fit a large unit. The windows don’t slide open, they swivel. You’d need to do a lot of work to make your solution feasible.
- As happens way too often in public education, the people making the decisions about how to spend money are sitting in quiet, climate-controlled offices miles away from where the teaching happens. Central office’s copiers always work, their rooms are always a reasonable temperature, their projectors always have fresh bulbs, because they can see those things and make decisions quickly about them. Not so for classrooms.
- There ain’t no money. Like I said, this is one small example. Other classrooms, and the library, suffer the same problem I described; others suffer from chill during fall/spring. That’s just one issue at one school. Other schools just in our district have similar issues. But when teachers talk about improving facilities, sure as shootin someone’s gonna pull out Kansas fucking City to show that throwing money at education won’t help, so why should we listen to teachers complaining about hot classrooms?
We’ve had these discussions before but I would like to once again share this article about the extremely high performing Finnish system.
It is likely more complicated for a society as diverse as ours, but I do suspect there are lessons there.
One of the ways diversity hits us especially hard is that one small American subculture–the extremely wealthy–is really averse to assimilation. The idea that equity of education should include their own children is anathema to them. Aren’t they entitled to a better education than the peasantry?
Unfortunately, that subculture has a hugely disproportionate impact on public education policy. Until we can either remove that subculture’s outsized influence, or change that subculture, I don’t see us going to the Finnish model.
Sure, but Finland’s public spending is grinding them down pretty hard. Not sure if the US wants to go down that path either.
There’s one surefire solution to that, though it’ll probably never happen. Just have the decision makers sit in your classroom for a couple hours at the right time.
I’m not seeing anything in that article saying that it’s public education that’s specifically problematic.
The only mention of education is when the article says that:
Education is a plus there, not a minus.
That goes down to even the middle classes. Parents want the best for their kids. But that is THEIR kids. Other kids are other parents problems. We see this all the time in our area where they will fight tooth and nail over school boundary zones to either keep certain kids out or to prevent their own kids from being switched to another school. They also push this in real estate and housing to only allow homes of a certain size and cost to be built in the area and definitely no apartments or section 8 housing.
I think they have also threatened to pull their kids out of the public schools and put them into private ones.
Looking at this discussion and going back to the original issue, I think for Hillarys “swat team” idea to actually work they must have the ability to 1. hire and fire staff. 2. to redraw district attendance boundaries. 3. to raise local taxes.
Absolutely. Parents who benefit from an unequal economic system see no reason why they should support public education: why shouldn’t their kids get an unfair advantage in life over their neighbors’ kids?
It’s one thing to put your own kids in private school. While that has some effect on other kids, the effect is relatively small compared to the advantage to yourself.
But the true proponents of inequality are those who put their kids in private schools while voting to defund public schools and voting to maintain unequal housing patterns and voting to support public education funding schemes that privilege rich communities. These are people who truly believe in an unjust educational model, a model that rewards US citizens for the great virtue of being born into wealth. As long as people who support this model hold significant political power, we’re not going to achieve any fundamental meaningful educational reform.
I doubt it’s quite like that; every really wealthy person I’ve met (mostly parents of high school classmates) had an attitude that was less elitist, and more along the lines of “If I have the resources to send my kids to better schools than the local public schools and to fund those schools better, that’s a good use of my resources.”
I think that’s really the driving factor with wealth-driven educational disparity- wealthy parents are more able and willing to spend their time and effort on their kids’ schooling, up to and including private schools than less wealthy people. Not out of some kind of mustache-twirling desire to segregate themselves from the hoi polloi, but because, like parents everywhere, they want their kids to have the best chance at success that they can provide. It just happens that their resources for achieving that are drastically greater than a working class person’s.
I see it in my nearby schools. One (Skyview Elementary) has a student body that’s highly low income and transient, from the nearby low income apartments. They struggle to get parents to even participate in the PTA at all. Another school in the same district, about a mile away (Moss Haven), has little to no apartment children, and has a relatively well-to-do student body. Its PTA is one of those ones that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for various school improvements and initiatives, despite the school being about 2/3 the size of Skyview.
Many of the more well-to-do parents in the Skyview zone either put their children in private school or get them transferred to other district schools (since Skyview is deemed to be “failing”, there’s a state provision for parents to transfer their children out). This isn’t a socioeocnomic hatred thing, it’s very much a desire to not short-change their children.
Personally, I think that parental involvement in a student’s education is probably the biggest predictor of a school’s overall success. Most attempts to improve education tend to revolve around substituting for various things that parents ideally would provide.
I’m not positing moustache-twirling. I’m positing that wealthy people think that a child’s chance for success should be primarily determined by the parents’ resources, and that ideology just so happens to put their own child on unequal footing. Until wealthy people believe that their resources are best used to benefit all children (via higher taxes for public ed), or until wealthy people have decreased influence on educational funding, we’re not going to have fundamental effective educational reform.
Well if we are doubling back to the op, realize that the question she was answering was what she would do to immediately help children in broken schools. Specifically:
Sanders responded first:
Her answer was:
So yes, money to repair crumbling infrastructure, specific to Detroit the return of local control, an education special forces unit of sorts to assist in the sorts of crisis situations the question specifically mentioned, and acknowledgement that something more needs to be done to support getting good teachers in the hardest to teach districts, with no specific plan as to what that would be.
No the basic concept was not having federal teams identifying the poorly performing and taking over districts; just one option for emergent crisis circumstances such as those they were specifically asked about. It was perhaps a bit more detailed than Sanders’ “tax the rich more” answer but for all its three points it was still fairly short on meat.
The wealthy people I know prefer to pay higher taxes and have better public schools and are willing to move specifically to where those high taxes and school systems exist. They live in the more expensive homes and pay more in taxes for the education than someone who lives in a less expensive home or who rents n the same community.
Some will then not be satisfied and go private (usually Catholic) all the while still paying the high real estate taxes.
No question human nature is the same for those of upper income brackets as of lower: we care more about our own kids than we do everyone else’s. We’ll vote for higher taxes to fund better schools for all but we will fight viciously to make sure our kids get what they need. My prefered solution to educational inequality is not lowering my kids’ educational quality to the lowest common level and I would do pretty much whatever it takes to make sure my children got quality education using whatever resources I have at my disposal to do so. I want quality education for all and am willing to be taxed more to help make that happen but I will expend much to make sure that it is there for my kids. Yes, I can afford private testing and tutoring, if I, or let’s face it, my wife, decides it is potential value for one of my children, even while attending a well funded good school with good teachers.
That’s not a feature of what wealthy parents think; it is a feature of being a parent.
Sure: they vote for taxes within their district, maybe. But they don’t vote for equitable schemes.
We’re looking at the same set of facts. I judge people a lot more harshly on this than you do, is all. It’s not enough to look after your own kids, if you do so by propping up an immensely inequitable system. If you support your own kids but vote for policies that perpetuate inequality, I think you’re condemnable on those grounds.
Sure, but what’s in it for them? More importantly, what benefit does that give their children?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, people will be generous, kind, thoughtful, etc… until something threatens their children in some way, be that physically, fiscally, or just levels the playing field. Then all bets are off.
Expecting the wealthy to deliberately forego the benefits of wealth for their children in the name of having effective educational reform for other people is not the way the world works.
I’m sure that exists but in my area the wealthy are willing to pay the higher taxes.
To me the people who are the biggest hypocrites are the liberals who talk big about diversity and supporting public education, yet put their own children in private schools AND vote down voucher plans which would help poor families go to other schools.