Your opinions on magnet schools?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Damn, monstro, you said it.

At my school–which serves folks at both ends of the economic spectrum–we have a part-time social worker for our ~450 students. National recommendations are that we should have 1 full-time social worker per 250 students, if there aren’t high needs.

Except that our school has some high freakin’ needs. We had a family experience multiple murders last year. There are homeless kids, and there’s an Intensive Intervention classroom, and there are kids whose parents suffer from severe addiction or other mental health issues. There are kids whose parents died recently, and kids whose parents are in prison, and kids who are woken up in the middle of the night by police raiding their homes looking for uncles.

When you have kids with high needs like this, the recommendation goes up to one social worker per 50 students.

We have one, part-time social worker.

So yeah, there are some real problems. And it’s heartbreaking. We need more resources, and by resources I don’t mean more armed guards, I mean we need more folks trained to help kids experiencing trauma navigate their experiences and return to stability. We are woefully understaffed.

monstro, I’ll quibble with one small thing. In your example of being afraid of a school, you mention having a school where 25% of the students are on free/reduced lunch. Just FYI, that number would be staggeringly low. In NC, the county with the lowest Free/Reduced Lunch percentage has 30% of students on the program; in California, Marin County bottoms out the percentage at 26%. 39 counties in CA have numbers over 50%, with 11 over 70%. NC has 14 counties at over 90%.

I only mention the quibble because a lot of folks have no idea how common childhood poverty is, and I don’t want folks thinking that a high rate at a school means 25% of students are low-income. A high rate is like the 5 North Carolina counties where 99% of students are low-income.

42

Point taken, LHOD. Thanks for setting me straight.

43

I think that the thing that you’re missing Monstro is why parents want to leave ‘bad’ schools. It has very little to do with the education there. It has to do with the people that go there. When they are judging it by minority population, ESL or free lunches, you are mistaking that for a proxy for being an academically ‘good’ or ‘deficient’ school. You really need to take it for exactly what it is. White flight. White middle class parents fear their kids becoming friends with ‘bad’ kids (also read this as non-model minority kids.)

Realistically, most children are not going to be able to take advantage of all of the academic ‘things’ that schools provide anyway. It has typically hovered around only 25-30% of students take at least one AP class. Even among white students, it’s only about half and of those, the majority take English and History which are offered extremely widely even at ‘bad’ schools. The number of students taking the obscure APs like AP Latin is so ridiculously small as to be effectively non-existent. Your kid isn’t going to be one of them. What parents are caring about are not 10 AP classes that their kid won’t take anyway. What they care about is they don’t want their kid to have their best friend be a black boy whose parents scrape by by working at Walmart - since they equate that demographic with increased drug use and criminality. So they flee to school districts and schools where it’s rich, white kids that they associate with Ivy League educations and summer homes at the beach. The ‘Academics’ argument is just dog-whistling.

44

The Finnish results show an education system in decline. But that people think that results speak for themselves or would deign to write it on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance is the best evidence I’ve seen for a need to improve science education. That’s not how any of this works. Without real science, people are just confirming what they want to find.

Massachusetts had the same average PISA reading score as Finland (MA was 1 point higher but within standard error so let’s call it equal.) Does that mean the anyone should start teaching reading like they do in MA? Not at all.

For testing, schools days, breaks, and staffing, why couldn’t we? Magnet schools predate the more recent phenomenon of constant standardized testing. The rest are just a matter of making the decision to do it.

What I don’t want is one classroom with everyone in it. So no, please don’t mainstream your learning-challenged 9th grader into precalc. You didn’t like “one size fits all” so call it “one classroom fits all”. I want no part in it. I’ve spent too much time fixing and seeing others fix damage done to mainstreamed kids and too much time having my own education slowed down to get onboard that fad train. Although given how many schools’ special ed departments are just dumping grounds, that may be the lesser evil in some locations; YMMV.
But back to magnet schools. While they can be set up along a smart/not divide, IME they’re typically centered around a topical focus. Looking back at the EPISD link, they have:
[ul]
[li]Public Service[/li][li]International Business[/li][li]Pre-Engineering / Computer Science[/li][li]Dual Language[/li][li]“New Tech” (not sure what that is – they didn’t have it in the 90s)[/li][li]Healthcare Professions[/li][/ul]While some of those may be catered to budding rocket scientists, most of them aren’t.

In addition to the topical programs above, they have two IB programs, one on each side of town. Plus two Early College programs, one on each side of town. There just aren’t enough students interested in an IB diploma to have the program at each of the 10 main campuses. Finland apparently has 18 schools offering IB programs. So about 3 schools per million people in both cases.

The Early College program didn’t exist back then, but it looks like they team up with the local Community College system to graduate kids with a high school diploma and an associates degree. I think it’s great that they offer this opportunity to kids who are ready for it and interested. I imagine most aren’t.

45

Add me to the list of those that had no idea how common childhood poverty was. Though I think Monstro’s point was correct. If I was looking at a school with 20% poverty for my daughters I’d start looking for other options. After your post I went and looked up the two elementary school my daughter could go to in our town. One has 13% and the other 7% of the kids on reduced/free lunch. The district as a whole is at 25% which matches your point but I think there is a wide enough range that the median isn’t a useful number.

In doing further research on my local poverty issue it seems that 11% of my county is at or below the poverty line and the cutoff for free lunch is set at 138% of FPL or close enough with reduced price going to about 150%. I don’t think the reduced price lunches is indicitave of local poverty just people who need help since household income can be over $40k.

As far as magnet schools I think they are great for letting kids who know what they want to do excel in that area but I probably won’t send my kids to one because they tend to lag athletically and my kids will probably get a sports scholarship to college. My plan is to find the best all around school and send my kids there. Right now that is most likely the local public high school though several parents at our preschool have been singing the benefits of a couple of the private schools. Parents should be trying to do what’s best for their children and the local government should set a floor that ensures even the kids who’s parents can’t help them still succeed. Magnet schools fit in nicely as a way for parents to help their kids excel without bankrupting the family.

46

To expand on this with some citations, USCB ACS estimates have state child poverty rates ranging from 10.7 to 31.3%. They have county data ( more extreme) and even by school district (which I expect to be more more extreme) but I’m less familiar with pulling Census data than I am with BLS data. It’s looking like on a county level, ages 5 to 17 in families maxes out at 72%.

https://www.census.gov/data-tools/demo/saipe/saipe.html?s_appName=saipe&map_yearSelector=2016&map_geoSelector=aa_c

And those are Census poverty thresholds, which are different from HHS thresholds, which are different from OECD thresholds. Pick your poison; none will give anyone happy feels though.
And of course the percent of children in households below the poverty threshold is going to be lower than the percent qualifying for free lunch. IIRC the income thresholds are 1.30x and 1.85x the poverty income threshold for reduced and free lunch, respectively. And if enough people at the school qualify, they just make it free for everybody (Community Eligibility Provision).
https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/fr-050818
https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/community-eligibility-provision

I keep calling it free lunch but IME it typically includes breakfast too.

47

I don’t think I am missing this point at all. I am all too familiar with people judging both schools and neighborhoods based on racist and classist criteria.
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48

Did you actually read that article beyond the headline? Finland (and myself) could give a toss about PISA rankings.

Even if they did, they’ve only slid a couple places, anyway, and are overall still #12. “Oh no, huge decline!”.

Finland is much better off than it was when the education reforms started 40 years ago, no-one questions that. And that’s the result that matters.

Oh, please do go on about how my science education is lacking…

What, that Finland still punched way above its weight in education rankings, and yet spends less per student than, say, the middling-at-best USA? Like that?

Which is why I’ve been saying all along that it’s no one thing that Finland does that I like. It’s the whole package.

So, *not *the Finnish system, then.

And I’ve already said I have no problem with those.

49

Where are these academically oriented, non specifically focused magnet schools? I can’t recall ever hearing of one of those in a public school system. Even the ones not focused on specific academic, career or arts subjects are still goal oriented- some districts have specific college prep magnet programs mostly aimed at underprivileged students.

I’m still not seeing where the problem is with letting parents/students self-select for success. Yeah, it doesn’t do the uninterested/unmotivated any specific good, but it also sets up the ones who want to succeed better than otherwise.

I’m reminded of Newton’s Third Law- it seems like for every kid that the presence of academically better students with more motivated and involved parents lifts up, their presence is also dragging those better students with more motivated and involved parents by an equal amount.

Having the ability to self-select changes that dynamic.

50

That’s a really low number for a district–like I said, neither NC nor CA has a single district with such a low number (I chose those two states because I live in one, and the other is real big, very scientific choices). Overall, CO has [url=KIDS COUNT Data Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation[42% of students qualifying for free/reduced lunch.

It concerns me a bit that you’d not send your child to school if a fifth of the children she’d interact with lived in poverty. This is IMHO, so I don’t want to dive too deeply on this, but I find that sort of decision-making unethical and counterproductive.

I’m reading Esperanza Rising with one of my book groups. It’s a story about a girl raised in Mexican nobility (essentially) in the 1930s, who lands on hard times and must figure out how to get along with people she’s previously considered to be literal peasants. A lot of the book examines how interacting with people she’s considered to be her social inferiors changes the way she views social class.

51

It’s not that low for around here. For example [URL=“Douglas County School District No. Re 1”]here](KIDS COUNT Data Center from the Annie E. Casey Foundation[42% of students qualifying for free/reduced lunch[/url) is another local school district with 5% on free/reduced lunch. The sad counter point is that for the state to average 42% there have to be counties that are similar to what you were talking about in NC with 90+% in the program.

As far as where I send my kids to school I believe that the more opportunities for failure that a person has the more likely they are to fail. It is incredibly temping when you are young to see the easy path and choose to take it over the perceived hard path.

When I was younger I went to a school district that currently has 34% free/reduced lunch I was on a remedial education tract with all of my other friends. My parents pulled me out and put me in a private high school where I was on the honors tract. In the private school the kids weren’t given the option of failure and my friends who turned into “failures” from that school are cops and teachers as opposed to the people who are failures from the public school.

My wife went to high school in a district that isn’t even covered by propublica which worries me about using them for a cite. The county has 21% of the population living under the poverty line though. She was a success out of school mainly because she didn’t talk to anyone she went to school with. She managed to eliminate her bad choices by not having friends.

Of the two options I think that being in a situation where it doesn’t matter who your friends are you will find a path where even “failure” is a pretty good life path. Or I guess a simpler way to say it is if my daughter’s high school is going to have a drug problem I’d prefer it to be adderall. That will mean that here life experiences before 18 are limited but I’m ok with here meeting the world a little later in life.

52

Real quick: “students in poverty” are generally ones that quality for free or reduced lunch. This is generally higher than the Poverty Line and is probably best interpreted as “Poor or lower working class”.

I am reading this thread but can’t really respond for another couple days.

53

I think it’s a matter of expectations, and whether or not those expectations are reinforced by your peers, your peers’ parents, the teachers, administrators, the school (as an organization), and the district as an organization, if it’s a public school.

I also went to a success-oriented private high school. Our “failures” were basically anyone who failed to go to a four year college- we had a couple of guys enlist in the military out of school, and it was definitely not perceived as a “good” thing. Everyone in the school expected to go to college, everyone’s parents expected the students to go to college, and the school and everyone who worked for it expected the students to go to college.

Even “better” public schools have a subset of students for which this is true, but from what I gather, you more or less have to be a high academic performer to be included.

Meanwhile, if you have a school where your parents don’t care, or pressure you to get a job, the school doesn’t expect anything from you, and your peers don’t either, it takes a much larger amount of goal setting and sustained self-motivation to get there. If nothing else, those expectations tend to drag you along like the tide if you’re having a lapse of motivation at some point in high school.

And that’s why I think magnet and charter schools are good- they allow people to self-select, form and/or get into those types of environments.

54

Please go back to my first post. I gave a link to one such school, Sumner Academy, in Kansas City Kansas.

Now over in Kansas city, Missouri - they tried to recreate a school like Sumner at Southwest High school where they set up a college prep school with high standards and it was really taking off. Then in 2010 a stupid moron of a superintendent, wanted to close some school and needed a place to put those students so disregarding Southwest current programs, he shoved them all there. Well of course chaos reined. All the scores and achievements flew out the window and with it students and community support. The school closed in 2012.
HERE is a great article from a strong liberal who tried to help.

55

After reading that article, it seems like your example of Southwest High School bears out what I’m saying- without that community involvement and culture of expectations, the unmotivated students and parents overwhelmed the rest and drug it down to a low level.

I kind of think that the place where the expectations and influence of the peer group is most important is for students that are “on the bubble” so to speak. The ones who a nudge one way or the other might send them on a path to future academic and professional success, or careening into a life of academic and professional failure, and the associated poverty.

But most students aren’t on the bubble. Where I get a little frustrated is in the notion that it’s somehow entirely the school’s problem to make up for parental inadequacy/incompetence/unaccountability.

I mean, I understand that the child doesn’t deserve lifelong punishment (in effect) for their parents’ incapacity to do what’s needed, but at the same time, it’s awfully hard not to expect that the school systems not spend the majority of their money on stuff that the parents themselves should be doing or providing.

They could do so much more if they weren’t having to spend money on stuff parents should be teaching their children - like remedial instruction for kids who don’t know BASIC stuff like shapes, colors, the majority of the alphabet, etc… And the notion that they’re tired, or not interested or whatever doesn’t cut it. By being “too tired” to teach their kids the alphabet, or provide them lunches, or any of the other myriad things that should be, and once were parental responsibilities, they cut into other children’s instruction time and resources that could be used to teach them better/further/more in depth than otherwise.

I get frustrated with this; my children’s education and future success is our family’s first priority after the basic physical needs like health, safety, etc… and it seems frustrating to hear tales of how schools are unsuccessful, students are under-educated etc… and then find out that (shock!) the parents are nowhere to be found and entirely uninvolved, to the point of neglecting basic things like feeding their children.

I’m halfway to the opinion that if you can’t feed your kids adequately, you’ve shown that you’re irresponsible or incapable of properly caring for them, and should be relieved of that responsibility. As far as the academic stuff is concerned, maybe there should be incentives for parental engagement? Not sure how else to accomplish that.

56

So what is wrong with an all-black school? KCMO has a magnet called the African Centered Academy.

A black kid does not have to be sitting next to a white kid before they can learn.

57

Agreed, I’ve often wished we could have some sort of publicly funded boarding schools where we could put those kids.
Funny thing is, often those kids do much better when they are taken from their parents and end up in places like Boys Town or end up with foster families.

58

Kansas, apparently.

Not one for reading a whole thread from the start, eh?

That doesn’t make them not generalist.

The problem is all the kids who don’t get to do the selecting - whose parents and circumstances fail them.

…and in so doing, it actively harms greater society.

Only if they let it. If they got more actively involved (rather than seeing other slower kids as competition for resources), it wouldn’t be that way.

It’s a fact that teaching others something helps you retain it better yourself. In the struggle against Apartheid, at our underfunded segregated schools, we had a motto: “Each One, Teach One”. I know it’s not as edgy as “Fuck You, I Got Mine”, but it got us through some dark times.

And only benefits the few. Not the ones without the privilege to self-select, nor society as a whole.

59

And Finland’s IB schools.

60

Again, it’s not the children’s responsibility in either case, rich or poor, motivated parents or unmotivated parents, academically good or not.

And, I’d argue it shouldn’t be the motivated parents’ problem either- why should they have to shoulder a heavier load because someone else isn’t holding up their end of the bargain?

People around here seem to put unrealistic expectations on schools and parents who are not broke-ass poor and/or undermotivated. They get castigated if they move away from the academically poor schools in hopes of giving their children a better shot and they get castigated if they want to self-select into a school that gives their children a better shot. Meanwhile, parents who live in areas not subject to these problems get castigated if they oppose rezoning/busing that would potentially introduce those issues into their children’s schools, and get bitched about if they resent feeling like they’re being expected to take up someone else’s slack when this kind of thing happens/is happening at their schools.

Parenthood is a weird thing; it should be fundamentally selfless, in that your primary job is looking out for someone(s) besides yourself. But it’s generally also very limited in that if you have limited resources in some way, the natural instinct is to apply those to benefit YOUR children, first and foremost. IF it happens to help others along the way, great, but it’s entirely and absolutely unreasonable to expect parents to put someone else’s kids first if there’s a question of educational quality, safety or anything else like that. And that’s exactly what the opponents of charter schools or magnet schools are advocating.

The message to a lot of parents comes across as: “We can’t let you leave this shitty school and try and improve things for your kid(s), because there are other kids here whose parents, for whatever reason, aren’t as involved/motivated/wealthy as you are, and we want to effectively let you do the heavy lifting to make things better around here, in the hopes that your efforts and your kid(s) efforts will bring the others up.”

It’s a fundamentally coercive notion, and not fair to those who want better for their children. Now I’m not a fan of vouchers; the last thing we need is people removing money from the public school system, but I think there should be some sort of ability for people to obtain better education for their children if they can’t afford to move to a better school, and who also can’t stand against the tide at an awful school either.

At some point, parents have to be responsible- the children aren’t old enough to make their own decisions until pretty late in the compulsory schooling period.

And just shaking our heads and saying “Oh, they can’t feed their children. That’s sad.” and feeding them at school for free only resolves a symptom, but doesn’t attempt to cure a disease. Same thing for all this other counseling that’s needed, etc… in poorer/underperforming schools. I don’t know what steps toward actually resolving the problem is, but I do know that it shouldn’t disproportionately fall on the shoulders of the few parents in those areas who are not part of the problem, and nor should it be forced onto parents who don’t already live in those areas.