The same thing can be said about all aspects of health care.
You are all making a great case for breaking up the stranglehold government bureaucracy has put on schools and teachers.
Why aren’t you all,for independent schools that compete for students? You could design your own curriculum, set your own standards, and all you’d be answerable to are the parents who choose where to direct education funds.
That’s been tried. They’re called charter schools, and depending on where one lives, they’re either a roaring success, or they’re little more than a dumping ground for the kids who aren’t quite bad enough to expel, and the teachers who aren’t quite bad enough to fire.
Because you might end up with the equivalent of these - which are supposed to be accountable to various government agencies but in practice have no oversight.
Because that would mean going to for-profit, and for-profit eniities inherently care more about what will make them the most money, and not providing the best service. Sure, in theory the competition is supposed to drive pricing down, but the reality is what happened with our college system, where prices have gone up to much higher levels than other countries that have free post-secondary education.
The thing about those who chase profit is that there is never enough. You don’t find people who find a balance that works. They always wind up chasing short term gains, and then bailing so they don’t face the medium or long term fallout.
Then there are all the people who wouldn’t be able to afford the better schools, which is counterproductive to the goal of trying to produce an educated populace. Heck, this is already a problem with private schools even being a thing. So even if the average winds up better, you get a lot larger diversity.
I could go on about why privatizing previously public entities is rarely a good idea. I can bring up how private schools tend to have lower, not higher requirements for teachers.
No, the government having control is the better option, as long as said government is responsive to the people. That’s why it works so well in other countries. Our government here in the US, however, is very unresponsive to the people. But the solution is to fix that, not to try a worse system, the one that public education replaced.
There are lots of models. Here in Alberta, everyone can choose where to send their kid to public school. Our neighborhood school had a bad rep, so we sent our kid to a different one. The money follows the student if the student goes to another public school. The only thing we lost by sending our kid to an out-of-neighborhood school was a free bus pass. If we wanted to send him to private school, we had to pay.
This also allows schools to specialize. There’s a performing arts high school, a couple of technical schools, A high standards public prep school, etc. Some schools are more open and focused on LGBT kids.
If schools are particularly bad they lose a lot of students, and if there aren’t enough students left the school is shut down. We shut down several inner-city schools because they sucked and the kids were pulled out and sent elsewhere. That at least introduces a level of accountability that doesn’t exist when schools have captive audiences and have no skin in the game.
Frankly, locking kids into their neighborhood schools was always a terrible idea. It has been especially hard on poor neighborhoods. A school goes bad, and parents have to move away to find a better school for their kids. So the people with means leave, real estate prices drop, the tax base goes down, and the school gets worse. It’s a vicious cycle.
And it’s an example of true ‘structural racism’. The poor minorities get stuck in terrible neighborhoods and lose whatever property value they had, and their kids get lousy educations, perpetuating the cycle.
Because it’s a terrible way of allocating funds for education. In the US, where schools are funded by property taxes, it means that even where rich and poor people share a school district rich people get to vote down tax increases and use alternate ways of funding only the schools their kids go to.
Countries with other structures for funding education have similar problems with what happens to funding of schools for the general public when you allow special schools.
The “stranglehold government bureaucracy has put on schools and teachers” didn’t organically arise in government and education, it was imposed by conservative politicians wanting to run government institutions as businesses.
New Public Management (NPM) is an approach to running public service organizations that is used in government and public service institutions and agencies, at both sub-national and national levels. The term was first introduced by academics in the UK and Australia to describe approaches that were developed during the 1980s as part of an effort to make the public service more “businesslike” and to improve its efficiency by using private sector management models.
New Public Management - Wikipedia
I’m not saying that education was perfect before this, or would be perfect without, but strong public education is the only way to avoid poorer kids ending up with the least funding, and thus a major factor in counteracting vicious circles preventing social mobility and general social improvements.
As I said above, school choice doesn’t have to mean private school. Where I live I can send my kid to any public school in the city, provided they have space. The money follows the kid. The schools are public.
We have a pretty good school,system in Canada.
The bad idea is funding schools from a narrow local pool. Adequate funding for all schools in a nation/state should be a national/state level concern.
It seems to me the model you describe ignores the major differences in relative cost of making the choice to switch schools for poor people. If they’re shutting down inner-city schools and moving the kids elsewhere, how is that not putting an extra cost on those families, if in no other ways than increased travel time for kids and parents to school and to all school related functions, and how is that and having a school shut down in your area not also a negative force on estate prices?
“The money follows the kid” is a recipe for punishing schools that are struggling for any reason by reducing their funding. It directly produces vicious circles. School expenses don’t change linearly with students. I have experiences the issues with this directly where versions of this is used in some counties at the college prep level in Norway.
Many American cities have versions of this, although parents have to justify why they want to send that child to the other school.
In Ontario, school taxes are now paid as a component of the property taxes, at a provincially-set rate based on property valuations as determined by the non-profit Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. The taxes go into a common provincial pool and are paid out to school boards on a per-pupil basis. This eliminated the funding differences between rich neighbourhood schools and poor neighbourhood schools which were a problem under the former funding system where school boards set and received taxes directly.
We can do this in California too. But it doesn’t really help the teacher shortage. Even the school districts that parents flock to have a huge shortage, because even those districts have terrible working conditions. One local district is famous for having some of the best public schools in California. Teachers there hate the parents, who are stereotypical tiger moms.
What’s the educational requirements to teach?
They used to offer Bachelors in a field and you could add a teaching certificate by taking a few extra classes.
For example, you could earn a Bachelors Arts in English with teaching certification.
Do you need a Masters degree today?
Effectively you end up doing a sort of education minor in addition to your major, even if it isn’t officially a minor. For high school teachers.
It is really important to know (for example) that you are looking to get a teaching credential in addition to your BS in Biology/Math/etc. at the very latest before you start your junior year in college.
If you decide you want to be a teacher after three years, you are likely going to need to take more classes and practicum after you “graduate”
This seems to be similar now (my niece) as it was in the 1990s (my sister)
You don’t even need a reason, in my area, as long as the recieving school has room. Choice schools of variis kinds are ubiquitous.
They do not seem to have brought forth any miracles.
Right. Merely moving the kid to a “nicer” school tends to do little for the overall system performance and meanwhile the schools that are fled from stagnate and those students stuck there suffer the consequences.
And this is the part that will be very very hard to sell in America (at least the places I have lived). Because our school are almost always funded largely at the district level, with some State money thrown in. If you had to normalize across an entire state there would be an uproar (putting it very mildly).
I believe Kansas tried something like that to help with both their urban and rural schools, and it has been tied up in litigation for years. I think it’s resolved now, and they have one of the lowest percentages of local funds coming into their schools (and, conversely, the highest level of state funds). Of course that led to them basically gutting school funding at the state level a few years ago after massive tax cuts, but that has been reverted now. Kansas actually caps how much local funding can contribute, so “rich” neighborhoods can’t fund their schools higher even if they want to. I believe this leads to massive PTO budgets and “booster” organizations, but I haven’t lived there for awhile so I can’t comment directly.
Missouri is the opposite, with a huge percentage of funding coming from local funding.
One of the other failures of school choice is that typically neighborhood residents get priority and if the school is full your out of luck. Guess which schools are always full?
In the end I do agree that funding normalization across the state (with appropriate weightings) with some amount of choice would be great, but as long as the public system has requirements to educate all comers, school choice won’t fix the issues.
In NC, they’re the latest iteration of “segregation academies,” the private schools opened up in response to desegregation so that wealthy White families could keep their kids from going to school with poor Black families. Charter schools get “flexibility” in how they meet student needs such as transportation and food; and if you don’t offer free hot breakfast and lunch and busing, poor families will be much less able to send their kids to your school. “We’re actively recruiting a diverse student population!” the administrators can say, while administering an almost all-White population.
Marketplace competition is a joke.
I’ll disagree a little with this re: Khan Academy (or maybe not “disagree” so much as “provide a different perspective in how to use it”). At least at the elementary level, you can do customized assignments, so (for example) students can watch one of KA’s excellent videos on finding the perimeter of a rectangle and then take a short quiz and then they can go to a classroom center with Geoboards and play a perimeter game and then complete a worksheet before coming down to the carpet for a whole-class lesson. When used in this manner, it can be really useful.
That said,
You’ve got in-depth insight into how KA worked for one student. I’ve got less in-depth insight for how it’s worked for between 150-250 students.
What I’ve found is that for about a third of students, it’s a complete waste of time. They disengage from it and either don’t complete the assignments at all, or complete them with random-clicks. They find it boring and offputting and see it as a chore to complete rather than as a learning opportunity. Another third don’t like it, but at least they put some effort into it. Another third kind of get into it and put real effort into it and make some gains through it.
In my 10+ years of using KA off and on, I’ve had exactly one student for whom it really clicked. He loved it, and by the end of October in third grade, he’d completed the entire third grade math course. By the end of April, he’d completed the entire fourth grade math course. The self-paced methodical nature of its independent work was exactly the key for his lock, and he thrived with it.
If he were telling us about Khan Academy, he might describe it as the best math teacher he ever had, and he might tell us about how superior it was to human instruction.
But I’ve got another 149 kids who’ll tell you differently.
Hawai’i doesn’t have school districts; everything is funded statewide (so basically the entire state is the school district.)