You often hear about rich and poor schools, and how the rich ones are almost always better. We should mix them together and stop having rich and poor schools. It would be better in many ways as kids can meet people from different circumstances and it also prevents schools from being neglected.
In the US, for the most part, schools are run by towns. Some towns are richer than others. It’s going to be hard to overcome this without changing the school funding model.
Virginia and and maybe some other state do it by country outside of the few cities that are not part of their surrounding counties. That can reduce some stratification, but unless you’re bussing kids far away, the schools in poor neighborhoods will be full of poor kids. It might be funded well, but I’m not sure how well that helps.
You often hear about rich and poor neighborhoods, and how the rich ones are almost always better. We should mix them together and stop having rich and poor parts of town. It would be better in many ways as folks can meet people from different circumstances.
It is far more than funding. Richer towns have more college educated parents who put more emphasis and work into their kids doing well in school. The students are less likely to come from screwed up homes and less likely to come to school hungry. The kids are less likely to be harassed for being smart.
Many failing school systems having funding that match or exceed very successful schools but have loads of other problems that poverty brings. If the area is prone to gangs then teachers are harder to recruit and keep and so they have to be paid more or you get crappier teachers.
There is not always a good way to mix populations from rich to poor. Depending on the area of the US the distances involved in busing can get to be too great for reasonableness.
If you try to force rich school districts to subsidize poor ones, what will happen is that rich parents will send their kids to private school and defund the public school system.
Besides, rich people are better, and their children deserve a better education.
Rich schools also tend to have better fundraising over and above whatever funding they get from taxes.
There’s not much equalization possible if a wealthy graduate wants todonate $10 million to build a swimming pool.
While there’s a certain basic level of spending that is tied to student achievement, the correlation is not as strong as many think, and you pretty quickly reach a point where throwing more money at the problem doesn’t solve it
Just like in housing - you need a certain amount of money to put a roof over your head and reduce your chances of being bit by rats while you sleep. But a $2,000,000 home doesn’t keep you any more safe from rat bites than a $200,000 home. There are other perks, of course, and there are other perks to having a rich school; student achievement isn’t necessarily one of them.
This is not to say that we should cut school budgets, of course. In most cases, we shouldn’t. But we need to hire people educated in the research determine *how *to spend that money, because it’s really a lot more complicated than most of us think. Hand a poor administrator a money press, and he still won’t be able to hand you a good school.
Percent of students who live in poverty is a greater indicator of student performance than amount spent by the school district per pupil. So to fix schools with just money, you need to fix poverty, not school spending.
Construct, thank you; this is an excellent summary of some of the underlying attitudes that are dooming all attempts to reform education in our country. As long as private schools provide an easy out to rich people, and as long as rich people believe they’re better, we’ll continue to have this semihereditary plutocracy that we’ve got, in which schools facilitate the transfer of wealth-accruing skills from one generation to the next along socioeconomic lines.
That said, if we don’t want a plutocracy, and if we want serious educational reform, we need to start with housing and prisons systems. Kids who grow up with parents engaged in the criminal justice system tend to have a much harder time in school; kids who grow up in impoverished and/or high-crime neighborhoods similarly tend to have a harder time in school. Let’s work on fixing these two inequities: dramatically reduce the number of adults involved in the criminal justice system, and find ways to reduce housing inequalities. We’ll see tremendous returns in our students’ lives.
I don’t think many, if any, are deliberately segregated along wealth lines. What does happen, is that school districts and individual attendance zones are geographically based.
In practical terms, this means that two things tend to happen.
One, in areas with educated parents who value education, you end up with high performing schools, because the parents typically are very involved in their children’s education- both at home, and with the school itself. Not coincidentally, these same parents tend not to be poor. I won’t go so far as to say they’re wealthy- the majority of who I’m talking about are college educated white-collar middle class parents.
Second, there can be efforts by these groups of parents to redraw the attendance zones to maximize this effect- i.e. draw the zones such that they include more middle-class neighborhoods, and exclude the apartments and other lower-income areas.
It’s typically not racism or even classism per-se; it’s more of a hard pragmatism, in that if a school has a high proportion of lower-income children, the focus of the school changes from very high quality education to much more basic things like free lunches, whether or not the kids can get appropriate clothes, nutrition and other basic needs. And when the administrators are concentrating on that stuff, they’re explicitly NOT concentrating on more strictly educational topics and metrics. Look at it this way- if a principal has a school where 25% of the student body doesn’t eat enough or can’t afford shoes, is that principal going to put their effort toward remedying/mitigating that kind of thing, or are they going to put their effort toward getting the school iPads and the like?
When there’s too much of a perception that the local school isn’t achieving enough academically, middle class parents tend to yank their kids for private schools, as they can guarantee a similar academic focus at the private school, only with more expense.
And ultimately, why shouldn’t they? Why should they play Sisyphus at the local elementary school against a boulder of low-income parents who don’t care about their kids’ educations, and against administrators who are more concerned with other things?
There’s a law of unintended consequences when you find out why shouldn’t they. It’s weird, but my daughter’s school suffers from it.
See, some years ago, it was just another shitty CPS (Chicago Public Schools) elementary school. They got a ton of money from the state and city funds because they had such a high population of low-income student.
Then gentrification started happening, and lots of not-wealthy-but-not-poor parents moved into the area, and started fundraising for the school. They did a great job. They reallocated the funds from the state/city to pay for important things that actually made a difference. The parent fundraisers paid for preschool (the state/city funds didn’t), full day kindergarten (when the state/city was only paying for half-day), year round enrichment courses, a full time ecology program with a full time ecology teacher, lots of before and after school activities. It turned into a pretty nice school.
Which only increased the gentrification of the neighborhood. Now not-wealthy-but-not-poor families were moving in because the school was pretty good. Exceptional, even, for its district.
And we lost a bunch of state/city funding, because our low income enrollment dropped too low.
Oops.
So now the parent fundraising efforts have become really overbearing, to keep all this stuff without the extra state/city funds that were partially, though not completely, paying for them. So far, we’re still managing, although we did have to cancel the preschool because we couldn’t afford it any longer. More cuts are on the horizon. If they happen, the school will get crappier, and the not-wealthy-but-not-poor families will move or go private, and we’ll be back at square one, getting more state/city funds, but without the skilled fundraisers and grant writers in our ranks of parents.
You can’t win.
The best way to end poor schooling is to introduce competition in schools. Currently if a school is failing the parents either have to spring for private schooling or hope the school gets better before it harms their kids permanently. A better way to do it is to allow school funding to go with the pupil and not the school. That way if a school is failing the parents can transfer their kids to a good school with no additional expense. If enough kids transfer the failing school closes. Survival of the fittest then produces a better school system at no additional expense.
Housing and prison systems are other large scale issues with disagreement over the cause, potential solutions, and even the problem itself. And it doesn’t help the kids in school now. Would you say to them there is nothing meaningful to be done that doesn’t involve those other two areas first? While I agree that those items are all interconnected, that is not to say that things can’t be done now to improve education.
I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that those problems should be solved first, but rather that they’re all interconnected and synergistic… for good OR ill.
I mean, if you have a family with 2 college-educated, non-jailbird, employed parents who value their children’s educations highly, you’re very likely to have children who achieve in school. If those children are surrounded by other children whose families are similar, it has a synergistic effect- there’s a not inconsiderable amount of peer pressure of not wanting to be the loser who didn’t graduate, or who didn’t go to college. This system tends to produce educated, employed kids. And schools are as much the product of the students and parents as they are of the administration and teachers*, so schools that are predominantly attended by this cohort achieve highly.
Similarly, if the parents don’t value the child’s education, are not educated themselves, and are underemployed and/or involved in the criminal justice system in ways other than employment, their children are likely to not be so high achieving in school. And when they’re surrounded by like families, it tends to reinforce that, and the kids tend to end up unemployed, uneducated and in trouble with the law. There’s no peer pressure to graduate, get a job, etc…
So the question becomes how to break that cycle- I’m not convinced any sort of government intervention is going to do it. There are too many societal factors to really point at one point and fix it and have everything else fall into line. There are plenty of attempts with schools, but as we can see, it isn’t really too successful.
And I think puddleglum’s system would only reinforce this system- all it would do is offer an escape valve for the few outliers in the underperforming schools… assuming it was implemented in a smart fashion. The problem would come in when everyone wants their kids to go to the “good” schools; would there be some kind of entrance exams or qualifications? Parental payments? Those are both starting to sound like private school methods to me.
- This is a common fallacy among reformer-types on the board; they think that the administration and teaching staff can effect all this change independent of the students and parents, and without their involvement. Not bloody likely…
That’s a feature, not a bug. The outliers get to go to a school where peer pressure reinforces parental pressure, and aren’t dragged down by their peers, and get a better overall education because the teachers aren’t dealing with discipline problems and have the time to actually teach.
Yes, private school methods are what we need. It makes no sense to set up a voucher system because public schools are failing and then require schools to replicate the public school system. Which was failing.
I would have a two-tier system - the public school, which has to accept anyone who applies, and private schools, who can impose entrance exams (and expel students). Voucher money follows the student - if he or she can get into a private school, the amount that would have been spent education him in the public schools get applied to his tuition. Schools must compete for the money.
Regards,
Shodan
My town’s district highlights this pretty brightly. One district, with a distinct Haves and Have Nots division. Magnet school system, so the kid who lives in a literal multi-million dollar mansion sits in the same Kindergarten class as the kid who’s family needs donations to put a warm coat on their back.
The poor kids don’t magically do as well as the rich kids, just because they go to the same school. There’s a huge achievement gap that isn’t explained by teachers being asses to the poor kids, or the rich kids getting awesome tutors. It’s a deeper problem, one that doesn’t get fixed just by spending more money.
I liken it to trying to end asthma in a polluted city by upping the use of inhalers. Sure, it might have some effect, but the root cause is unaddressed.
Of course we’re doing meaningful things to address students that are not meeting their potential. But if we’re serious about really helping these kids, we need to address major social issues outside of schools that affect what kids can do.
The private school solution always smacks of Sins of Their Fathers to me. Children whose parents are both invested in their children’s success and are competent at working the academic bureaucracy already have a huge advantage in our current system. Increasing access to private schools furthers this advantage, at the expense of students without parents with those skills and priorities. Because the child, not the parent, is the primary beneficiary of this government service, I think this is unacceptable.
Do you think we could get a college-style elementary education going? I mean rather than a few schools per town, of questionable quality, we have a few high-quality schools per state, and we could board kids there instead of busing them a couple hours every day. Boarding schools seemed to work well in the past, and then the students all get the same food and same uniforms and same housing, eliminating those factors from poor kids’ lives. Prefects or somebody could make sure kids are doing their homework and teachers could know when a student needs extra attention whether their parents seem to care or not. I imagine many poor parents would be happy not to have to pay for babysitters 9 months out of the year. And we could set these schools up to be within an hour of everyone, so the parents can come visit their kids any night or weekend or holiday without too much trouble.
In our district the school with the highest scores was in the area where lots of parents are Silicon Valley execs with multi-million dollar homes. While the test scores were better the school got no more money than other high schools in the district and the physical plant and teachers were average.
The district wanted to move one elementary school out of this high school to another because it was badly overcrowded. The parents went ballistic. They were sure that their kids would never learn anything and be polluted in the other high school.
What happened was that the test scores of the “bad” high school went up thanks to all the kids with ambitious parents who now attended, no one lost money on their houses, and all was fine in the end.
In our district school test scores are better correlated with the number of kids getting free lunches than any other factor.
That’s probably misleading- the scores would have gone up anyway, just by virtue of an infusion of academically successful kids. The bigger question is whether or not the scores of the kids who weren’t successful and whose parents don’t give a shit went up in spite of that. And also whether the scores of the transferred kids were as good as they’d have been at the other high school.
Something tells me that the ambitious parents did the best they could when dealt a bad hand, and probably expended ridiculous amounts of effort and influence to try and drag up the quality of the school. That’s not at all fair to those parents and students if the choice is “Work like devils because the other 2/3 of the school sucks academically and doesn’t care”, especially if the 2/3 benefited unduly from it.
Ultimately it shouldn’t be the responsibility of motivated and educated parents to subsidize (through money, effort or influence), the children of unmotivated and apathetic parents. I can’t fault parents for not wanting to deal with that, or put their kids in schools where that attitude and expectation is the norm.