Group A: Are you talking about the rich bankers who redline neighborhoods, or the police who brutalize citizens until there’s a neighborhood culture against talking to police, or the local governments who tear down black business districts in order to sell the land to wealthier, white-owned businesses? Who exactly is this group A?
Because surely you’re not blaming school problems on kids who grow up in poverty as a result of these policies, who live in trauma, who come to school freaked out and who have so much going on in their lives that it’s difficult to sit still. Surely you’re not blaming my nine-year-olds.
Oh, good: you’re blaming the parents! The parents who grew up in the same cycle, who maybe dealt with racist teachers or police themselves, who don’t trust the (mostly white) authorities they encounter, who are disparately impacted by incarceration and who may have a broken home due to drug policies that put one parent in prison! They’re at fault, goody!
What do we do? We fix this shit. This is way bigger than the schools, but integrated schools are one small, vital piece of the solution.
Your paraphrase is . . . interesting. Here’s an equally accurate paraphrase of what I said: “Schools are made out of hamster kibble and dreams, but when white kids dream about elephants, it’s their fault for killing Tinkerbell.”
If you’re gone, I’ll miss you terribly; but if you’re not, you may wish to reread what I wrote and try for a more accurate understanding.
Yes, there were good teachers and all of the subjects were taught and we had computers (no internet for quite some time, but yeah). The classes were difficult depending on the person, definitely a challenge but the requirements to move up to the next grade were relaxed for those who were struggling, while those who proved the could do the work fine, were given more challenges/not allowed to move up if they didn’t do well, they looked at grade records and my guess is just took a wild guess. Unfair practice in my opinion.
It also did have fine arts, music etc… It wasn’t heavily populated but it was there as more of an elective course, until the music department got set on fire by some idiot, then everybody’s schedule got changed according to what they were studying, some of us were stuck with an extra P.E. class in its place (early in the morning, terrible). It didn’t open again while I was there. We were only required to take two years of math, 3 for science and 4 for reading/writing related things. 2 Years of music/fine arts (see above) and the rest I honestly forget.
Pretty much all of the resources were there, mismanaged a lot of the time but they were. We were short on space so a biology department (which looked mint condition, it was strange) was used as a detention area instead of for lab work. Lab work was pretty much non-existent.
Nice deflection but anyone re-reading your posts will get the same impression. You are blaming some wild systemic conspiracy for the failure or shortcomings of some students instead of coming up with some valuable insight. Now I may not have a plan for it, but at least I am not pretending to by blaming someone else.
No. We disagree about what to do. You label it (rather foolishly I think) “the right thing”. I disagree with that labeling. It is NOT “the right thing” for me to send my kid to a shitty inner-city school. That might be putting her in real danger, or doing real lasting harm to her. It would be deeply immoral in my personal belief & values system to do something with that much potential for long-term harm and damage to my own child.
Why is it my responsibility to do more for other people’s children than they are willing to do themselves? At some point people need to learn that in real life there is a cause and effect. People on these forums like to talk about consequences for speech they disagree with. What about consequences for unprotected sex? What about consequences for actual criminal behavior? What about consequences for political policy that literally prices millions out of work?
A simple metric I look at when evaluating schools are those with the highest test scores, and lowest free and reduced lunch. There’s also plenty of places that stack rank schools based on various factors. There are other factors of course, but with just those two most of the noise is filtered out. This plays out in public vs other public schools, so the variance from charters and vouchers can be set aside.
Even in that type of example, you’ll see people self select to the best schools they can afford, in the best neighborhoods they can afford. Since local public school is often tied to address, do you think there should be some extra tax levied on affluent neighborhoods to deincentivize living there over less affluent neighborhoods, with the money funneling out? I am having trouble seeing how something like that could work where the negative implementation impacts wouldn’t outweigh any potential benefits.
Two answer the original question, I went to public schools and didn’t care for it. It wasn’t awful - but I spent a lot of time in classes where the teacher wasn’t very inspiring. At the time I felt that being in private school would have given me higher quality instruction. I wanted every minute to be intense learning. Not only unrealistic, but not meeting the needs of other students.
I think citizens should have a basic level of education: literacy, critical thinking, reasoning, civics, history, applied functional competency in math, science, grammar, whatever is being taught. You can’t have technical skills without some level of thinking, and that’s the rub. The forces of ignorance do not want us thinking for ourselves, but they do want a pool of compliant, qualified labor for whatever the industry du jour might want.
I understand the former, but the latter? Test scores are at least partly due to teachers and administration–but why are you looking to shield your children from being around poor people?
Right now, I appreciate your honesty in debating. I’m afraid I’m not feeling the same for pretty much anyone else who’s arguing this issue with me; the misrepresentations of what I say are too exhausting to correct one by one.
Everyone is someone else’s child. That’s trivial. We’re talking about what we should do for humans who can’t do it for themselves, i.e., for children. If we’re to live in a society, we need to be responsible for the helpless among us; and there’s few folks so helpless as minors whose parents are unable/unwilling to help them.
Irrelevant nonsense, because my nine-year-olds haven’t had unprotected sex or engaged in criminal behavior, and they’re the folks we’re talking about helping here.
Meh, I’m a mathematician. Words are just numbers that aren’t trying hard enough.
Sure (though I’m definitely not rich and have never been rich, and whether I’m smart is an arbitrary opinion), I want a great public school system too. I’m just not willing to sacrifice students’ education throughout the decades and decades it would take to actually get to that ideal system. Even if everyone can’t have nice things, it’s still fine for some people to have nice things.
There is also Home schooling to isolate kids from the influence of dangerous things like NOT thinking for yourself and parroting the fuzzy thinking common in too many educators. :dubious:
I was just about ROTFLMAO when my daughter started working and remarked about a co-worker “Now I know why people are so down on public schools.” :rolleyes:
Not to mention the cliques based on sociologic groups. And that one is very much “religious.”
I will stipulate that home-schooling is not a panacea; my daughter was so focused on learning it was scary. YMMV
For the record; she was tutored in reading, then given math workbooks until about second or third grade equivalent, then started with a computer based curriculum which she used through high school level. Yes, it had a Christian component, but that was basically a Bible history class, not woohoo weirdness.
What about we use methods that are shown to work, like integrating schools? What about we embark on a campaign to undo centuries of racism (and calling that a conspiracy fundamentally misunderstands what a conspiracy is), including things like redlining neighborhoods and reforming our penal system? What about we don’t look for kind of bonkers gimmicks, and instead treat the disease, not just its symptoms?
Sure. But that requires securing the poor neighborhoods so that they are safe for businesses, other people’s kids, and the residents. Good luck with the level of policing necessary for that.
Parents are responsible for their children. If they don’t want children in a crappy environment perhaps the parents should make better life choices?
It’s no mystery that minimum wage and illegal immigration have exacerbated the problems of the poor.
Now if you really want to solve generational poor education you’d have to take the kids out of the environment a good portion of each year. I don’t think that’d ever happen because it would require acknowledging that the poor have some agency in their own environment and situation.
Sure, I’m for that. Find the most segregated schools and divvy those students up to other schools. If you have a school that is all black, divvy the students up into the all-white schools. That would work, right?
That’s what happened during first desegregation, and the result was that a lot of black cultural institutions were destroyed. Why not break up the all-white schools instead?
Better yet, why not mix 'em up, keeping vital cultural institutions alive, just integrated?