But France says she didn’t know that until February. She has three children and works three jobs. She thought her oldest son was doing well because even though he failed most of his classes, he was being promoted.
This actually matches to another issue I noted, to escape poverty in the proper way, there is a dire need to help parents. It not only leads to parents having more time to coach their kids, but also to stabilize their housing problems and fund schools that drop the ball like that in the proper way.
Of course, most anti-intellectual conservatives ignore that or do not offer ways to solve those issues that do affect a lot of students that live in poverty.
There is no doubt that these communities have a lot of dysfunction that makes it hard to educate the kids, but that’s not much of an excuse. One of the reasons these schools serve terrible neighborhoods is that bad schools in America help create those bad neighborhoods. Because parents have to send kids to the public school in their ‘catchment area’, if the school is bad the middle class moves away, degrading the tax base and removing good student role models etc. Eventually you get neighborhoods where only the poor and disadvantaged live, and the schools become third rate.
One ‘simple’ fix would be to simply adopt the Canadian model and let parents send their kids to any public school in the city they want, subject to availability. That would eliminate the perverse incentives and downward spirals of education and income in such neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, this is now really hard to do. For example, it would lower the real estate premium in areas with good schools. So NIMBYism is a big factor in preventing this kind of change.
The next best thing to do would be to allow student money to follow the student, and allow school choice to bring better schools into these areas. That’s where the teacher’s unions will fight to the death for the status quo.
Yeah, and the best way to do that is to allow for school choice and let education money follow the students. Then the terrible public schools would either learn to compete or they will go away.
Btw, it looks like 5 million students have left the public school system for private schools or homeschooling in the past year. That’s a pretty big number. This too should be raising alarm bells about how we educate kids in public schoolsand how much power the teacher’s unions have, but so far I’m hearing crickets.
For once I agree with you. I don’t think helicopter parenting and fancy educational toys are necessary for kids’ achievement, but a safe home with enough food, and parents who aren’t too busy to ensure that their kids are actually going to school and staying on track surely are important. And shouldn’t society be providing that for every kid anyway?
IMO, short of disasters like @Sam_Stone’s example, the biggest reason some schools are bad is not bad teaching, but disruptive pupils who prevent others in the class from learning. And a lot of that is probably due to problems at home. I don’t often see this mentioned in debates on school reform.
This sort of thing happens in England, too. If a school is good, parents want to move into the catchment area, so property prices rise. And these are the parents whose kids will do better anyway, so it just amplifies any initial differences.
Is that benefit worth $30,000 per person? And if you are educating people for the benefit of society, I think society ought to pay for it rather than the individual.
It’s hardly a surprise I have ‘missed’ that this is your point, since this is the first time you have made it.
Silly me for thinking this was the point you were making:
Bloody hell, you think college is a good way to get out of your bubble? That explains a lot…
The government delayed closing schools and nurseries in the UK because they didn’t want grandparents taking over childcare, putting the most vulnerable at greater risk. And children of keyworkers continued to have in-person lessons anyway, so that their parents could do their jobs.
No can do, I worked before at a charter school, I was not impressed when compared to well funded public schools. As usual, what you propose is a very incomplete solution.
Not sure what you’re rolling your eyes at, unless you think someone’s “test taking ability” is a particularly important skill or that it is inherent to them.
Ad you’ve already demonstrated, you know fuck-all about America.
If you think “if you close the schools the government needs to step in and do something to help working parents get child care in a covid-safe way” is some kind of “gotcha” I hate to disappoint you, because I agree.
Did you work in a public school where a student could ‘graduate’ with a 0.13 GPA - near the top half of his class? if not, perhaps you aren’t comparing charter schools to the right public schools.
Bloody hell back at you, there is one reason why the right wing in the US hates higher education, particularly when their Sunday bible school kids go to college.
Read for comprehension please, there was a conditional I added there that takes care of your dig here.
I will have to add though that there were students I saw who were helped a lot, to go to the next grade, when they should have not when I worked at the charter school.
I’m rolling my eyes because when I find evidence that contradicts your argument, you don’t even acknowledge, let alone address it, but instead announce that your point was something else all along. And blame me for missing it, no less.
I know selective US universities are hardly bastions of diversity. And a college campus is inevitably going to be a bubble in its own right. Which one did you go to?
True. I forgot @Babale used to be a conservative. I suppose for someone with that upbringing it could be considered getting out of one’s bubble. But it’s getting out of one and into another, for sure. At my university, the Conservative student society was about as (un)popular as the Socialist Worker one, which is laughably unreflective of wider society. And while more varied in some ways, the student population was inevitably very homogeneous in others.
The fuck are you talking about? Just because you were too stupid to understand my point the first time doesn’t mean I changed it.
Eta: if what you’re confused about is the phrase
Then I withdraw my accusation of your stupidity, that was a bad choice of words. I’m not talking about performance as in what your grades are, which is kinda implied by that language and makes my choice of words poor.
To clarify, I was referring to them being able to learn the college level material, not to how well they are assessed by their professors who may be checking their test taking ability rather than their understanding of the material even at the college level.