Then you have to make them care as much about the poor than they do their own children.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s it, in a nutshell, right there.
Because it isn’t only about the funding model. Its about the difference in a variety of attributes between the poor and the middle class and the wealthy on a statistical scale. Like “did their parents go to college” and “do their parents have spare time plus the ability and desire to help them with homework” and “do their parents value education enough to provide an encouraging environment for education” and “do they have role models in their community that prove education is valuable” “Are they read to at home” “Do they have access to books at home”
Those things aren’t things you buy with governmental funding (maybe you can buy your way into books in the home, but that doesn’t mean they’ll get read- they don’t do any good used as coasters).
And because when you have a kid in my kid’s class who struggles because they or their parents don’t - or can’t afford to - care, my kid loses educational time and attention. When its half the class or more, I’m lucky my kids learned long division. Unless you are going to fund private tutors for everyone so each snowflake gets the instruction they need - or break kids out by ability - and from my kids high school experience, once they broke kids out by ability - surprise - it broke on socio-economic lines for the most part.
At that point, the middle class and the wealthy pull their kids from private school. Then you’ve merely ghettoized the public school system - and further restricted the desire of people to fund it.
That’s what I’ve been trying to say throughout the thread. Most parents would consider that if their kids grew up and went to a better college by yanking them and putting them in a better school somewhere else a net gain, even if the kids at the underperforming school were 5% worse off as a result.
Again, those other kids aren’t THEIR children, after all. Let their parents worry about them.
And what Dangerosa describes is completely true… and not the province of school districts or individual schools to remedy. They can’t mandate that parents care about their children’s education, or that they be involved in an effective way.
It’s a larger issue than schools and school districts; it’s literally a cultural difference. I know that among many poor Hispanic immigrant families, there’s not the same recognition of what a ‘good’ job is, and consequently why a good primary and post-secondary education is so important. In other words, if working construction for a living for $12/hr is considered a good, solid job, there’s not a lot of incentive to excel in school, and in many ways, probably provides some incentive to drop out and get down to brass tacks working construction. This is in contrast to most middle class families, where that sort of work is considered the last stop before living under an overpass and eating from dumpsters. I won’t say I have a clue what the urban black experience is- it’s not something I’ve discussed with any black people I’m friends with, but it has to be similar- there’s some reason why education isn’t viewed as useful to many people.
Sorry, this is just not always (or even often) the case. The tax base of good/great school districts is often much better and more diverse and they can therefore levy lower school taxes on homeowners. Think about the tax base of a semi-urban ‘good’ school district, with its upscale shopping malls, department stores, businesses and other tax base candidates versus a rural poor district where the only tax base is gas stations and farms. The same problem can often occur in urban ‘bad’ districts. When I worked in K-12 in Pennsylvania, (in my particular area) the best school district had the lowest taxes in the county by far. The ‘worst’ district had (you guessed it) the highest taxes…
The bottom line is that the single best indicator of whether a child will do well or not in school is the value his or her parents put on education. Period. This is why poor Asian immigrants who come here do so well…their parents are fixated on education.
At the other end of the spectrum, while it sounds good to say we should put more fathers in the home in order to help this problem, I see no evidence that this would work. If the father has zero interest/respect for education, it’s not going to help. Hell, it might even hurt. While it is true that kids with two parents in the home tend to do better, it’s not merely the presence of adult bodies that make that happen. This adults have to have made the right choices in life, even if they are poor. Having those people in the home will help, just transplanting a body from a prison into the home will not.
Actually, the best predictor of level of education is intelligence, which is pretty much fixed by the time a child starts school. Asians do better than other groups because they have higher intelligence.
Most schools are nothing more than holding grounds for delinquents until they can graduate to actual prison. If they learn anything, that’s wonderful, but the real goal is to keep them off the streets for as long as possible. Educational reform is impossible because education doesn’t happen in a vacuum and most of these people are doomed to fail as a consequence of their genetics and poor household environments anyways.
Self-interest ought to do it. When poor kids aren’t educated and socialized, your (that is, everybody’s) economy and culture suffer.
But they and their children will have to live surrounded by those other kids. When those other kids are grown, what kind of fellow citizens will they be?
I’m not worried about when those kids are grown, I’m worried about the fact they are bringing guns into my kids schools NOW in high school. That there are knife fights in elementary school. That personal property is stolen in second and third grade.
These are serious concerns. What I’m saying is, these things will affect you and your children, long-term, even if your children aren’t in those schools. If they are, well, you can work on present and future concerns at the same time.
And I’m saying that I really wish I could have my kids concentrate on two things as kids - learning and being kids - that’s darn hard to do in a school that is mired in a culture of poverty.
Working on future concerns - go for it, I’ve left my kids in this school, I’m eating the dog food. They are in high school now where its better. But honestly, if I had to make a recommendation to anyone else with the money to get their kids into a school district where the problems of poverty were smaller, I’d say “screw the future, these are YOUR KIDS” - take care of THEIR FUTURE first. And their future being their immediate future, their ability to go to college and get a job in an increasingly competitive global market. Those are far more likely to impact my kids day to day adult lives than the 20% dropout rate.
Probably terrible.
Where are THEIR parents though? Ultimately it’s the other kids’ parents who are responsible for their children’s education.
That’s the problem with this thinking- it’s essentially saying that we give the worthless parents a pass, and that everyone else pick up the slack. Which would be fine and dandy if we had infinite resources, but nobody ever does.
So picking up the slack for the worthless parents almost always means that it’s at the expense of one’s own children. THAT is why it’s such a hard sell to so many people. You’re basically asking them to choose other kids, who don’t care about school, and whose parents don’t care, over their own children, who ostensibly do care, or are at least not averse to education.
Not over. Past a certain point… it is the same choice.
The argument mostly applies to people who don’t have kids at all, too: they too will want a functioning civil society around them in their elder years.
When you or your kids go to drive somewhere, would you prefer that the other drivers be licensed, insured, regulated by traffic signals and law enforcement? Or is that not your business? “What if THEIR parents never taught them to drive responsibly? Why should we pick up the slack?” Uh…
This, I think, is the crux of the disagreement. I’ve mostly abandoned this thread because I find the attitudes in it far too depressing. The essential calculus I’m seeing here is that children should pay the price of their parents’ poor decisions.
Parents are not ultimately responsible for their childrens’ education. Society is. We all are. And it needs to be a high societal priority that every child has the opportunity to succeed in school. And if there’s a hurdle to the success of a significant group of children, we need to make it a high societal priority to remove that hurdle.
I’m seeing a lot of washing of hands here, saying, “what can we do?” The answer is: let’s try.
The hurdles that need to be removed include, but are not limited, to those described in Adverse Childhood Experiences, such as having:
Which of these can social policy affect? How will it change children’s lives to reduce these experiences?
It just depends on what you consider the floor. The acceptable floor for driving seems to be licensed, insured, etc. It could be more rigorous if we chose - at a cost. The floor for educating has also been chosen. More can be done, at a cost. But never would I choose other kids over my own. Ever.
So what happens to those other kids you ask? When I was younger - middle school is when I started to notice. Keep in mind this was the thought process of a pre-teen. I looked around at the available jobs, and how few highly paid jobs there were as compared to the lower paid jobs. I talked to people who were leaders in their professions and asked how many people were above them, and how many below. The proportion was illustrative. At that point I began to think, the world needs ditch diggers and a lot of them, figuratively speaking that is. My actual thought was that it didn’t bother me that a lot of my peers would not be able to achieve what they set out to, because I needed people to lead myself later on. Not everyone can be high performers. There is no light without darkness.
It is the crux of the disagreement. I don’t think anyone is saying that children should pay the price of their parents’ poor decisions - but unfortunately they do. And the downstream impacts of trying to mitigate that are on balance worse than any potential solution offered thus far.
I could not disagree more with your view that parents are not ultimately responsible for their children’s education. Society can still prioritize education for all children without shifting the responsibility of providing it. There is nothing in my child’s life that I am not ultimately responsible for. If more parents felt that way I suspect it would overshadow any of the 8 factors that you list as hurdles to education.
This may, or may not, be a semantic disagreement. When I say that ultimate responsibility goes to society, I’m not saying that parents have no responsibility. I’m saying that as a society, we cannot wash our hands when parents aren’t meeting their responsibility.
Posit Bob the eight-year-old. Bob’s mother and father are responsible for Bob’s education, no doubt. But Bob’s mother ran off to join the circus, leaving Bob at home with his father, who works 60 hours a week and also goes to AA meetings at night in addition to probation meetings and church services, and doesn’t have family support to provide adequate childcare for Bob. Bob is babysat by a secondhand iPad with access to Hulu and Youtube, and often goes to bed after 11:30. Bob lives in a high-crime neighborhood and has watched a family member be shot. Forcible police actions are at least monthly events in Bob’s experience in his neighborhood.
His parents have failed to provide him the conditions under which he can get a good education. Should we as a society be complacent, since ultimately its their responsibility? Or should we, having seen his parents’ failure, nonetheless make it a high priority to give this eight-year-old a chance at success?
I don’t think it’s necessarily semantic, but the description you give is not sufficient to describe the extent to which you are talking about. Who do you think bears greater responsibility, society as a whole or the individual parent?
Saying that we can’t wash our hands when parents aren’t meeting their responsibility is fine, but vague. I agree, we can’t wash our hands, but that is not informative as to both what constitutes ‘washing our hands’ and what responsibility accrues to society. I think we touched on this in this thread already, though it’s been several days.
This also holds for your example of Bob. Of course society should make it a high priority to give Bob’s eight year old a chance at success. But that’s too vague to be actionable. It also doesn’t address the fact that while it may be a high priority, that doesn’t tell us where it measures up against other high or even higher priorities. I’m pretty sure you’re not advocating that Bob’s eight year old be forcibly removed from Bob, but without specifics it’s hard to determine where those priorities fit amongst unlimited other priorities.
The answer to this question is yes, absolutely he should be given a chance at success. But the followup question is then how do we give Bob the best chance at a successful life? We could give him the most current textbooks, multimillion dollar science labs and arts programs, Gordon Ramsay as the head cafeteria chef, etc. and none of that would change the fact that he watched somone shoot his cousin or make him go to bed at a reasonable hour.
It seems that his education and chances at life would be markedly improved by mitigating the poverty and violence in which he lives. Better food stamp programs, safer housing, etc. would surely help but those things won’t touch the biggest issue here, which seems to be that his father has no time for him and he has no mother at all. An increase in the minimum wage and availability of afforable housing would potentially allow Bob’s dad to cut back his work hours so he could be home to parent his child but these things cannot be helped by extra funding or improvements at the school.