So THAT’S where all the rich folks come from…
:smack: LOL
Actually it fits, doesn’t it?
Charters are typically situated in low income areas- more wealthy areas tend to divide into private schools vs. public schools.
Either way, it’s a way to separate the motivated from the unmotivated. And I’m fine with that- it’s unreasonable to expect parents to forego attempting to give their children the best leg-up that they can, so in low income areas, charter schools allow parents to self-select, hopefully for better outcomes. On the higher-income side of things, private schools do the same thing, except that they actually have a beneficial effect on the public schools, in that every private school student represents a extra student’s worth of cash that aren’t actually enrolled.
It’s also not an obligation of motivated parents to pick up the slack for unmotivated parents in terms of working for good conditions and resources, etc… And it’s kind of shitty to stick motivated parents in a position where they have to do just that in order to try and get what they think their child needs.
Suppose two young students are otherwise much the same except for notably different interest in and aptitude for, say, music. How does the education system in Finland cause them to finish their education with the same musical talent?
It doesn’t. Are you perhaps misreading the word “equity” I used before for “equality of outcomes”? The differences I’m talking about, that the Finnish system greatly lessens, are not innate differences, but circumstantial ones like parental income, involvement and student background.
Not allowing private schooling, requiring Masters to be a teacher, not getting hung up on grades and homework, all these help.
I should correct myself - “not allowing” is too strong a word. “Strongly discouraging” is perhaps better, they still have some Waldorf and religious schools. Which still aren’t allowed to charge pupils and must admit all applicants so not really relevant.
Basically, if I could describe what I like about the Finnish modelsimply, it is that it attempts to remove the student’s circumstances outside school from affecting their schooling as much as possible.
Sure, parental involvement is nice and encouraged, but really for schooling it’s the students’ years-long relationships with their highly educated, motivated teachers that matter much more.
Not having adequate nutrition (a real stumbling block for poorer students elsewhere) isn’t as much of an issue when every kid is getting a free school lunch.
Poor circumstances for doing homework is less of an issue when you don’t have all that much homework in the first place.
Stress about your GPA being good enough to keep you in your magnet school is a non-existent worry when grades and constant standardised testing aren’t the focus of your education.
Being good at some subjects and sucky at others is less of a concern when phenomenon-based learningis emphasised over traditional subjects.
Finland doesn’t treat education as a marketplace. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any other system I’ve ever come across for both the students themselves, and the teachers. Other countries (often Asian) may score higher on testing - but their students are in pressure-cookers to do it. Finnish students are outside playing…
Forgive me for asking this and I dont mean to be rude, but have you visited Finland and seen their schools first hand?
While I agree everything you mention sounds great and I’ve read about Finland’s educational system also, but still I am only going off of second hand reports which again, all sound really good.
During my adult life I’ve been decently well acquainted with 6 full-time pre-college teachers, all of whom were well educated and IMO certainly well motivated.
It’s been interesting to me that each of these has independently told me that the single factor that most strongly predicts student success is the attitude and support of the parents.
Yes, and yes. One of my good friends in the SCA is a Finnish primary school teacher, and I visited her at work when I was there (and spoke to her class about South African history).
I’m sure that’s a lot more of a factor when teachers *don’t *teach the same class for several years.
And if those circumstances outside school help the student? Does it remove those too? That doesn’t sound good to me.
Most of what you describe is fanwank with little to no scientific backing. And more importantly, it has little to do with magnet schools. You can have magnet schools and require master’s degrees (not that this improves educational outcomes), give everyone free lunches (the only one I had any exposure two was a CEP school, so this was the case), reduce homework, etc.
If Finland takes a one*-size-fits-all approach, then I’m not on board. Because I have seen myself how one size does not fit all. It may produce high averages, but that does not mean it is giving each student his or her best individual education. Not allowing the smart ones to reach their full potential, or even pulling them down, is not equitable. If some students are ready for calculus in 9th or 10th grade, let’s let them take calculus. If there aren’t enough of them in one school to offer the class, then let’s let them group up so we can offer that opportunity.
*Two sizes, really, as they have a separate vocational track
Here are the programs offered in El Paso, which is the only place where I have any limited experience with magnet schools. They are not concentrated at the high-income schools. Most of these didn’t exist in the 90s, and the one we tried ended up simply not being up to snuff academically**, so we opted for private boarding school. An option MrDibble would have eliminated.
**It was abysmal, really. If, in the entire history of offering AP Chemistry, only one student has passed the exam, there is a problem.
I don’t see how. If a kid has e.g. involved parents, the system won’t remove that.
The Finnish results speak for themselves, actually.
It’s an alternative possible system, is all.
Can you also have them without constant standardised testing, a shorter school day, 75 minutes+ of breaks, half the student-teacher ratio, mainstreaming of learning-challenged students, and all the other components of the Finnish system?
Did you read any of my links? “One size fits all” is the very antithesis of what they do.
What the Finnish system boils down to is “really, no child left behind, we mean it.”
The Finnish system does no such thing.
The vocational/academic split only happens after secondary school, isn’t required, nor is it an absolute split - vocational-track kids can still go to Uni, for instance.
I’m only in favour of eliminating private schooling when the public system actually works for everyone, like it does in Finland. If the government is more concerned about test results than student welfare, then independent schooling makes perfect sense. That’s why my kids go to one.
Slight correction - the split happens after middle school, at 16/17.
Part of the problem in “bad” schools is well, students really are BAD there. They wont go to class. If they do go they constantly want to disrupt things and have their phones out. They wont do homework. They throw things at the teacher. I know one school where the kids were caught smoking pot in the bathroom. Others cause fights.
What can you do with a kid who goes “I’m not going to do anything and you can’t make me!”? I dont care if your a dedicated teacher and have a master degree you just cant work with some of these kids!
These gets GET free lunch. Their schools ARE fully funded. They HAVE good teachers. Some of the students just dont give a hoot and cause massive problems.
Thats where a magnet comes in. You can separate the good ones and at least they get a good education.
Now see if I had my way, if a kid is just causing trouble in a school and is not making any headway on learning, the school should be able to kick their butts out at age 16. The way it is now they can stay in school and cause disruptions until they are 21.
I didn’t mean Advanced Placement students don’t come in contact with the average students. I meant that Advanced Placement students generally have little influence on their less academically motivated peers. “Go fuck yourself, Nerdbrain,” was the attitude of most of my classmates when it came to educational and/or behavioral matters.
The high school our sons attended sounds like the one where Manda Jo works and the one DCnDC attended. One was.in the math/science program after being in a similar program for middle school. He was burnt out by sophomore year and crashed and burned spectacularly freshman year of college (he’s planning on returning to college spring semester, this time at a small liberal arts school that strongly supports LD students). Our second son got into the Communication Arts program at the same high school, but dropped out of it halfway through sophomore year. Since it’s our neighborhood school, there was no need to transfer. He got into a good film program, but is just a little more than halfway through first semester. It’s a decent school for the kids who aren’t in a magnet program; one our son’s friends who was.I’m the regular program is now at Yale.
Some thoughts:
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“Bad” kids often don’t start off that way. They are frequently created. In the US, we warehouse poor people into the worst neighborhoods, in the worst schools, the worst classrooms, and then act surprised when they have the worst behavior and the worst life outcomes. You can be a good kid and wind up “bad” just because you’ve been influenced by the bad environment around you. It would be great if we tried to fix bad environments rather than just airlifting out a handful of kids and telling ourselves the others who are left behind are the “bad ones”.
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We need to get out of the mindset that schools serving poor students require the same amount of funding as a school serving well-to-do students. They don’t. They need more. A lot more. They need extra guidance counselors. They need more paraprofessionals and social workers. They need more aides and volunteers. Poor kids are less likely to have books at home or a personal computer. So their school media centers need to serve this need. They don’t spend their weekends going to the theater, museums, and zoos. Not because their parents are necessarily apathetic, but because these places cost money and aren’t on the bus line. So they need to get these experiences at school (at waived or discounted costs). And yes, poor students need their schools to serve them meals and connect them to dental and medical care.
Conservatives can cluck their tongues over how it is so awful to expect schools to serve as surrogate parents like this. But tongue-clucking isn’t enough to make hungry kids magically learn.
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We need to remember that when some of us were growing up, we weren’t expected to know algebra in the sixth grade while juggling a million extracurriculars. Our parents didn’t always attend PTA meetings and we turned out just fine. When we had problems with our teachers, our parents often told us to just suck it up and deal. They didn’t storm down there and grade-grub on our behalf. Our teachers could have been teaching all kinds of crazy stuff, and our parents wouldn’t have known about it because there was no way for them to know. They sure as hell weren’t checking our homework every night. But the norm for middle-class parenting today is to be intimately involved in every facet of Junior’s life. Woe to the parent who is stretched too thin to meet this norm. If our parents weren’t super involved in our lives back in 1983 but they weren’t deserving of the “apathetic” label, then maybe we need to not be so judgy about a parent who would rather kick up their feet at home after a long-ass day of wiping other people’s ass for minimum wage as opposed to sitting in an uncomfortable folding chair for two hours at a boring PTA meeting. I always managed to drag my parents to Open Houses, but I don’t think they ever attended a PTA meeting. They didn’t chaperone field trips or volunteer in the classroom. But my parents weren’t apathetic.
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People, consciously or not, often judge schools by the make-up of the student body rather than than the quality of the education provided there. “Oh, a quarter of the students are on free lunch! A thirty percent are ESL! And seventy percent are black or brown! The school has got to be horrible!” So they don’t even give the school a chance. Which then creates an awful self-fulfilling prophesy.
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People are strange. I totally understand the strangeness, but still. We all appreciate the enormous value of parental involvement in student success. College educated parents are much more likely to have kids who are academically successful and college-directed. It is not that hard to understand why this is the case. So why do parents have such a conniption fit over finding the “best” schools? I think people are bankrupting themselves (literally and figuratively) in the pursuit of the best school, when a good school could very well meet all their wants and needs. I wonder if parents have been conditioned to think that if they settle for “good”, they aren’t doing right by their kids. I think this ridiculous race for the “best” creates a system where even perfectly good schools look bad. “What do you mean you only offer AP Calculus AB? OMG THIS SCHOOL IS NO BETTER THAN THAT SCHOOL FROM LEAN ON ME!!”
Thanks for all you had to say in this thread, monstro. I hope your thoughts are being read carefully because you have hit a whole bunch of nails on the head.