Good thing I don’t do that. Nor I plan on doing so. Point being that I do not see criticism like that directed to misleaders from the right like The Daily Caller or The Epoch times.
I won’t send my daughter to a crappy school if I can possibly avoid it. I want her to get a better education than I did, and more importantly I want her to be happy.
We struggled with this as well, and that’s with good public schools in our area. If you have the means, it is extremely tempting to spend top dollar to “guarantee” a good school experience for your children, even if you are also paying high property taxes for good public schools.
It requires putting a value on something beyond the well being of your own family, as well as having some faith in yourself as parents and your children, to choose public schools (assuming you have the option). But if you are an engaged parent in anything but the worst-performing public school I think you can mitigate any potential shortcoming in the quality of your child’s education.
That Slate article points out one of the things that has become very apparent to me now that I have kids in the public school system: the quality of the school relies immensely on how engaged the parents are. If most of the parents that care leave the public school system it is no wonder that those schools struggle. No amount of money can replace parental engagement. And any engagement I can provide at my sons’ school I know is also having an effect on plenty of children that don’t have engaged parents, something that would not be the case at a private school.
Ultimately people will vote with their feet and move or create districts that benefit their families. What will happen is the splintering of municipalities based on wealth more and more and the education disparity will continue to grow. It’s one of those ‘unintended’ consequences.
Approximately, 90% of the reason we live in our municipality is tied to the schools, the general attitude towards education and behavior, and the potential of the tax base to support them. I’m sure we are not unique with this motivation.
I’m really surprised folks don’t study incentives and behavior a bit more.
There’s a growing ideology, to which many municipal school boards subscribe, that says that there are no incentives or reasons for behavior besides a struggle between races. Everything can be explained as either whites conspiring against blacks or blacks responding to oppression - other motives such as “wanting the best for your children” are some combination of a delusion and a lie, and those who cannot be easily slotted into the white v. black race war, such as Asians in the Boston public school system, must be reduced to soulless “wedges” who are being manipulated by one side or another. Thus, looking for any other incentives for behavior is a waste of time and probably part of “white supremacy culture” in that it denies the fundamental truth about the racial reasons for a given policy.
Race has been substituted for class in the grand struggle?
This becomes very apparent when you see gentrifying neighborhoods where the schools, which have been ranked low for decades all of a sudden start scoring higher. It’s not because they got a miracle Principal or the teachers magically became better all of a sudden - they got a bunch of new engaged parents. And individual students benefit most from how engaged their parents are in their education in ways far more important than the number rating of a school.
Amusingly I grew up in a place where the big Catholic private school was also the biggest drug problem and was generally considered a worse educational environment than 2 of the 3 (if not all 3) of the public schools.
Anyways, my wife is a public school teacher, so the chances of us sending our child to private school are 0.00%, not that I was inclined to do so anyways.
Yes.
This underscores what a hard job teachers and school boards have, trying to improve standards when they have no influence over this very significant factor.
I do think there is a limit to what individual parents can do, though. School culture is largely determined by the kids, and it’s the sum of the attitudes of all their parents. Even the most eager and hard working kid is going to struggle to learn in an environment of constant disruptions.
I have long said that Catholic schools tend to score better on standardized tests because the type of parent who is willing to go out of their way to send their kid to a private school is also the type of parent who is more involved in their kids education. Similar to kids who are in band tend to have higher test scores, not because they are inherently smarter, but because the parents are more involved in their lives.
The problem is that for a lot of white people, part of what they want for their children is a majority white school. They don’t want their kid to be a racial minority. They fear their kid will be bullied, or they just have a strong impression that schools full of brown kids are inherently worse. They say things like “we didn’t think the culture was a match” or something, but what it really is is that they don’t want their white kid in a non-white school. Some diversity is preferred, as long as it knows its place. As long as their kid doesn’t look like the weird one in the class photo.
ETA: A few years ago, they did a study of my majority-minority district and showed that non-poor white kids did significantly better here on state assessments than non-poor white kids in the surrounding suburbs. I will try to find it. It was a really startling result, but it didn’t make much impact.
The original source was respun, after the people responsible realized that sections of the community disliked the reasons they’d quoted.
I’ve been through school too, same for my friends and relations, I’ve got a kid in school now, same for my friends and relations, I’ve got friends and relations in public service — and I think that my explanation is more likely than yours.
Thats nice, I also did go through school and, worked in college libraries, School ITs and now mostly in the admin office.
What is more likely is what was noted many times in the past, the right wing sources of information not only loves to copy paste misunderstandings like that, and never correct those misunderstandings or info that is wrong. They also love that their listeners or viewers will not ever demand better from their sources, but that they will have a beef with the ones that do clarify or correct. Some day they should realize what the accumulation of misleading information leads to.
I’d like to see that if you can find it. Don’t you teach in some kind of magnet school though?
I do, but the study was for the district in general. I will look for it.
Thanks. Can’t really tell what to make of it without seeing it.
That’s the way to do it.
How much is the “lots of work” really necessary?
I’ve read about the research on this but not gotten into it myself. (And I don’t know that I would be able to distinguish sense from nonsense so easily even if I did dig into it…) But for something like math, my current understanding is that a bit of practice every day – frequent brushing up on skills, but for limited time – is sufficient for most purposes, rather than just getting dumped on every day by a hard-ass instructor.
How much is the mountain of homework really necessary?
Boo!
Here. This article just compares Dallas ISD to Highland Park–an exclusive enclave city completely surrounded by Dallas. There was a follow up article that compared Dallas to the “prestige” suburbs (that are wealthy, but not HP wealthy) and Dallas did even better. But I can’t find it.
It depends on what you are trying to do. Yes, a lot of homework as assigned is a waste of time, but if you are trying to basically cover all of high school and the first two years of college in four years, it’s going to be a lot of work. Not so much in the form of strictly transactional homework (do these problems) but in the sense of studying until you achieve mastery. The younger the students are, the most you have to mandate the details–smart isn’t mature–but the idea is the same. For example, half our Freshmen take AP Biology. However bright they are, they read more slowly than the college freshmen the class is designed for–so if they want to master the class by May, it’s going to take more hours than it would take a college kid. And they are in 7 other rigorous classes, not 4. Even if those are all stripped down to functional minimum, it’s going to be a lot more work than if they’d stayed at their home school.
Interesting, thank you.