Freddie: Congrats on becoming a father (eventually they sleep through the night). I agree with your point "I personally believe that school quality (as defined as the ability to manipulate quantitative metrics and relative placement in the performance distribution!) is largely illusory". I would be interested in your perspective on teaching quality being defined as the time it takes to learn a particular skill. Granted students all have different aptitudes and work ethics, but will different teaching methods teach similar students faster? Perhaps you could address this topic in a future article. Thanks
This is probably the top question I’ve had regarding Freddie’s education perspective as well.
Anecdotally, as a musician who provides private (1-1) instruction, tutoring is likely the broad answer to “most effective method to transfer knowledge and assess skill development”, but I don’t know what the the most “efficient” answer is at scale. Granted, private instructors have different pedagogical methods themselves, so there’s a large variable for variation in instruction quality. And this combines with student aptitude and work ethic (you cannot force a student who doesn’t want to be there to learn music). But tutoring is the most direct way I know of to cultivate skill development with a noticeable increase in quality over time (dedicated musicians who may have a lower aptitude than high-talent musicians, but who consistently apply knowledge attained through tutoring, will achieve a higher skill floor and greater performance success on average).
Teaching quality should also be defined by how pleasant it is for the student to learn.
I'm a tutor. I have some students with truly incompetent teachers; they learn anyway, partly because they get help from people like me. But they suffer in the process.
Students generally know how well they "should" perform. And they're pretty good at converting overperformance into additional leisure, or correcting underperformance with additional effort.
We moved to an area with highly rated schools. What we didn't know was that when we moved in, our local public school had suddenly got rezoned and a stealth housing project was added in.
A charter opened up nearby and we went there. At first it was great, even for our special needs children. It was like a private school.
But then someone informed the charter how they would get more money if they recruited kids from the poor areas and suddenly the school changed. We put our kids back in public school.
The public school, in an effort to keep families, created specialized schools, and it worked well enough.
As to private schools, we did try that for a year with our youngest. Most of the teachers (underpaid and unlicensed) taught there so they could get tuition reductions. Quality was not great.
I've probably held every single opinion about education at one point or another in my life, me and my family and my kids attending a variety of public, private, religious, charter, and alternative schools. Whichever one I'm currently engaged with at the moment is typically the one I hate the most at that moment. So right now I hate charters. Like in your experience, they are required to deal with the special needs.
In many cases getting a good education requires the parents to fight the system and advocate for their child, regardless of private/public/charter. (Am I really "supporting the public school system" when I have my kids enrolled there but have to fight with the administration? It feels like a zero-sum game.) Always remember to drop the words "free and appropriate education" into every conversation.
I hate the special needs system in general. I battled with them constantly. I remember one IEP meeting (9th grade in good public school) for my autistic son, where they told me he knew all the material, but struggled with homework, so he was failing. I argued with them that they should test mastery verbally. "We need metrics!" "Isn't the goal to see if he learned the subject?" "No, we need metrics!"
I often had to threaten to sue to get anything done.
If I could I would ban charters, not because they take resources from public schools, but because so many are corrupt and don't do better than the public schools. It won't happen as the politicians would then need to reform the waste in public schools and they are unwilling to take on the teachers union.
We just need to stop pretending everyone can be a doctor or is college material. Make education useful. Teach skills, trades, etc. And accept that some kids can't be helped without larger societal reforms.
Right. After 13 years of IEP meetings, I want to burn the system to the ground. Most of them, even with well-meaning teachers and staff, were about process not result.
"In many cases getting a good education requires the parents to fight the system and advocate for their child." Absolutely true, afaik. Even just a credible threat of a fight is probably enough. But without that, a school and its kids are hosed.
So when you say "our experience with charters was bad" you mean "we went to charters in the first place to keep the poor kids out, but they started letting in poor kids, so we went back to publics because they sorted the poor kids into specialized schools, so win win".
Don't get me wrong, that's fine, it's just....way to prove Freddie's point.
No. Our school was failing our sons. The charter, at first, was far better than the public schools at special needs. There were plenty of poor kids of all races in the charter, but they lived nearby and the parents were involved.
Once the charter started bringing kids in from 10 miles away, with zero parent involvement, that made the charter school worse in every way. Teachers left. Funds were stolen. My special needs children were bullied by fellow students without any concern by the staff.
Since we were not rich, we decided to go to the least bad option. It was not great, but it was better than the charter, which had just become a tool for maximizing state funds.
The public schools were poorly run. The school district changed zoning to dump poor kids at our elementary school, even though the nearby kids were middle class and lower middle class of all races.
We didn't do the Chinese or French immersion elementary school.
So, no you don't prove any point. Parents try their best for their kids and charters are a false promise, in my experience. Move to the area with the best zoned schools you can afford, not because the teachers are better, but because the parents are involved and care.
That said, I would not support special needs kids with severe intellectual limitations in public schools. They need an entirely different system that should be covered at the state level, not the district level. And if the kids have mild disabilities, I'd remove their protections altogether. No reason to think they do any good to educational outcomes.
So either way, in my policy world, I'd remove the protections you want from public schools and let the states decide what they want to cover based on what they can afford and what works.
Good piece. Two additional dimensions to note are regulation and the exploitative nature of many lower-tier private schools.
A major reason teachers take pay cuts to work in private schools is there is so much less administrative BS and paperwork and trainings they have to do. Some of these voucher programs will come with state entanglements that the schools don't want.
Many voucher systems set aside the first batch of funds to go to families below a certain income level, with any excess to everyone else. There is rarely excess; it would be too expensive. And those kids generally can't get into the elite private schools. So it has the effect of subsidizing the fly-by-night private schools that, as a rule, (i) don't provide better education than public schools, (ii) are able to exploit parents financially in ways other schools don't, and (iii) don't have anywhere near the resources to handle behavioral and special ed needs that public school systems have.
As an example of (ii), a mother I knew was looking for a lawyer to get out of a contract. Her daughter got into a bad situation at the school partly due to the incompetence of the staff. The mother pulled the daughter out in March, but the fine print on a contract they'd signed said that if the daughter was in school on January, the parents automatically owed tuition for the following school year. Many of these schools are basically reenacting the for-profit college scam, but they have better access to taxpayer funds because the states can't gatekeep as well as USDOE.
"public funds should be used for public schools, not private enterprise"
so, should government be prohibited from paying money to private companies to achieve other objectives...like no private military contractors, etc? this seems like a decent slogan, but not a very meaningful principle if it mainly applies in the education space.
Freddie went into great detail about the laws that public schools have to follow that private schools don't. So giving public funds to schools that don't follow those laws in no small part because they are maximizing profit (as they should, as businesses) is a problem because they don't follow those laws.
There are two implications here that I find questionable:
1. private businesses performing public functions should follow the same rules as government employees.
2. private schools are "maximizing profit" -- this is actually not true of all private enterprises and definitely not true of most private schools. there are lots of other reasons private citizens do things.
But most importantly, Freddie didn't say "public funds should be used for public schools unless private enterprise follows the same rules"...but maybe that's what he meant.
"The answer, of course, is that private schools screen out the hardest-to-educate kids, making the job of a teacher much more attractive."
I'm too stubborn a socialist to take a job in a private school, but here in the UK I did have to undertake a term of my training in a very fancy private boarding school (with, I must admit, gorgeous grounds and some very friendly teachers). The kids were indeed far, far easier to teach than those at the state school on a very deprived estate where I did my other two terms of training and then chose to work. However, what troubled/ completely disenchanted me was my attempts to get help for a dyslexic student (with other challenges) in terms of her ability to engage with my English lessons. I had a meeting with the Head of SEND / Inclusion and they informed me not to worry too much... "she'll be gone within a year".
Basically, the lack of differentiation between 'minus house points' for behaviour and those for lack of attainment in lesson would make it very easy to manage out students.
My son attends a private school that has managed to poach 2 veteran teachers from public schools, despite offering a lot less money. These teachers gush about how happy they are to be at a school that better aligns with their "teaching philosophy."
.... And I'm sure it doesn't hurt that they now work with a small group of students who are universally smart and well-behaved, with pleasant parents who are happy to volunteer.
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or merely reporting, so apologies - but in a more general way I don’t know why, on a blog and amid a readership sometimes sympathetic to labor, it should draw suspicion that teachers like other workers, prefer decent working conditions.
Not at all, of course I understand them preferring a nice environment. That’s why we send him there!
Also public school seems especially bad these days. My employer has nothing to do with teaching, and ever since Covid we’ve gotten a lot of job applications from public school teachers.
The political climate in some places has become frighteningly hostile to teachers, and teachers are very vulnerable to politics because they work with the public for the government. I wouldn't be surprised if those teachers were fleeing from parents and/or elected leaders.
It’s interesting - in my experience the private school parents can be very demanding, “I’m not paying $50k a year for a B now am I?” And working on a year to year contract one unhappy parent (who is also a donor) and you’re out on your ass.
It seemed a lot more customer service focused than a public school teacher would be comfortable with.
We have a nice sweet spot because it’s Montessori, so you don’t get the intense prep school parents. Tends to attract people like me who value a pleasant and nurturing environment above everything.
And the tuition is relatively low for a private school, nowhere near 50k.
Likely they retired and are collecting pensions or have spouses with better benefits and better pay. Or they just moved and couldn't get hired because they were too old.
No one. Seriously, no one. who requires income or wants security picks private over public.
And I don't know what this planet is where teachers like volunteer parents. Zorkon?
Finally, most suburban schools are filled with smart and well-behaved kids and pay twice as much.
Yep it's elementary. They always want parents to come on the field trips, in particular. (And there are a ton of field trips; apparently Maria Montessori believed in getting out of the classroom or something)
I think Maria was on to something! I find my memories of school are chiefly those field trip days, which I think were much more common then?*
We would (be told to dress for) and go to e.g. the symphony. We went to the paper factory, got Mead swag! Went to the popcorn factory. To the newspaper plant and the TV station. We all rode the train to the ice cream factory in another town. It was exciting to be *given* a scoop of ice cream at the end of the tour, but rivalling it was the train ride, my first. There was a water cooler with paper cones, also a novelty to us; we all kept moving forward to slake our sudden bottomless thirst with a new cone, until the teacher finally said Stop. It. We went to the fat stock show. We went to the Natural History museum/planetarium so often that I made a familiar beeline for the grizzly bear, taxidermied in a threateningly erect posture. We went to the State Capitol and the home of the Hero. Those of us with near-perfect attendance or good grades went to the amusement park in May!
In middle school we went on a geology/fossil hunting expedition overnight.
I was sad that the field trips mostly died out in high school, but we did have a marvelous biology teacher, Ms. Doris Countee, who took us out to the Gulf to collect specimens for our tanks, and to the sea turtle rescue place and onto the research vessel, and another time to the operating theater and cadaver room at the Medical Center.
*A friend of mine attended high school in a county usually described as the poorest in the nation, in competition with the neighboring county. Perhaps 50 years ago it was not so poor. But her senior field trip trumped all of mine: they went to the mountains in Mexico where the monarchs' breeding ground had recently been discovered, to tag butterflies.
Also (I forgot about this when I commented) when I was a kid, my mom taught public in an affluent suburb and came home crying often and quit halfway through the year. Because of behavior problems and lack of administration support. Then she took a huge pay cut to teach preschool until retirement.
My dad’s income made this possible, but leaving public for a better work environment is definitely a thing.
It's a thing, but it's not *the* thing, and it's not among the top dozen things. But that's obvious because coming home crying after a day in an affluent suburban school is clearly someone who can't handle much at all. Good thing she married someone who could make a living.
The school put all of the struggling students in one classroom -- special ed, autism, behavior problems, academically behind -- and expected her to figure it out. Students who had meltdowns and got physical were put right back into class. I'd have been crying too!
I did two years in a suburban (not affluent) district and I was that teacher. It was my specialty when I taught, but I was never so unsupported as that school. In the inner city district where I spent most of my teaching career, every teacher in my building knew my kids and would support them. In the suburban district you'd think we all had cooties.
Tell your mom she did a good thing. She believed in kids who needed it, when they needed it.
I ended up leaving teaching after just short of a decade and now I work remotely in tech. There's a huge mental and physical toll with that work, and it is a young person's game. I could not have switched to pre-school! Those adorable little munchkins are agents of chaos.
I don't think you're wrong about this. Many of these considerations were part of my family's decision to go to Catholic school instead of a perfectly fine public school. It's important to us for our kids to be immersed in an environment of in tact families who all give a f*ck. We can revisit the issue again in high school.
It's worth noting that public schools themselves, particularly the really good ones, also operate this kind of shell game. They do it based on the real estate market and restrictive zoning. This is softer and less express than what private schools do, but it's the same outcome. People pick the private school for the same reason they pick the public school that happens to be located in the solidly upper middle class or above neighborhood full of nice people who protect their turf via aggressive NIMBYism and showing up in force to any public consideration of changing boundary lines.
Here's where I will challenge Freddie, because I believe the solution to 'save' public schools from voucher-ization (and to be clear I 100% think we should) the way to do that is to change public schools, maybe a lot, and not in ways a committed leftist might like. Institute hard-core tracking based on objective capabilities. Subject the disruptive to discipline and beyond a certain point reliably segregate them from the mainstream. Maintain robust accommodations for those with documented disabilities and other special needs. You can do all of this stuff in 1 building or at one site if you want to. But I think we all also intuitively know the uncomfortable things doing something like that would reveal about who ends up where, and since we can't stomach that, a lot of places will end up with some shady and/or ramshackle voucher system.
I sincerely believe that if schools could "reliably segregate [the disruptive] from the mainstream," it would solve at least a third if not half of the actual problems, and a solid 75% of the PR problems, of public schools. Parents are scared to send their children to classes where they will not be protected from (real, physical, not ideological or metaphorical) violence. They will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, either in private school tuition or in buying a more expensive house in a nicer school district, to protect their child from being in a class with even one habitual chair-thrower, and I don't think they're wrong to do so.
My kids go to the top public schools in our state and there is a premium for housing. Teachers beg to come to the schools because they have less issues. The schools get half the funding of schools in poor areas, but parents pay a lot out-of-pocket.
The other "good part" of our metro has most of the kids in private or charter schools. Parents don't trust the schools so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, at what point is a child permanently banished (fuck your “segregated” euphemism) from your “reformed” public school system? Does the child receive due process first? If the due process goes awry, will everyone involved be sufficiently punished (i.e. sent to prison)?
Your ideal will never materialize, if you can’t be ACCOUNTABLE for it here, where the stakes are low, because, fortunately, you are just another fundie troll who rants from behind a screen name.
And no, of course you don't need due process to remove the perpetually disruptive from regular classrooms and yes, of course there should always be a path back for those willing to take it. Speaking of screeching at the world from behind computers, I'm always amazed by how much those who demand endless accountability and accommodation seem impervious to the idea that others might reasonably ask for a bit of the same of them.
No due process is the epitome of no accountability and accommodation. Your “perpetually disruptive” student may be reacting to bullies at the school, who are not being held accountable. Or, they could be living with a disability that the school has not FULLY accommodated. What if the allegations against them are entirely fabricated, because the school doesn’t want a Black/LGBTQ/fill-in-the-demographic student there, no matter how well they behave? That’s why due process is essential. Schools fail everyday. If their failures are not exposed and punished, innocent children and families will suffer.
You'll find most neighbourhoods have the same few kids being 'disruptive' since elementary school level.
Also having a disability make you MORE disruptive does not mean you're a good student or person. We had a kid with bi polar disorder in our class, and he got a lot of sympathy for that. What people did not know, because they made the assumption that because he had a disability he was a good person, was that he was a little sociopath, who played manipulation games and when ever he was challenged on it hid behind his mental health status.
This is quite a perceptive article -- and for me, it underscores why I'm in favor of more school choice.
When parents desire to remove their children from schools that they don't like, I think they should have the power to do so. Yes, sometimes their reasons for disliking a school are morally wrong (most commonly, racism). But often their reasons are entirely reasonable and virtuous -- saving their child from being victimized by criminals; escaping abusive teachers and administrators; seeking better academic resources.
But more fundamentally, I consider that choice to be *in principle* a power to be exercised by parents, not a power held by "society" or the state. The choice of how and where to educate children is a core parental right, and it should be ceded to government as little as possible.
This is an old saw from the school choice movement, but only because it's true: the rich have always had school choice, and they always will. School choice as a movement is about finding ways to spread that privilege to poorer people by making school choice cheaper.
To me, that's the axis along which the talk of "fairness" and "equality" makes sense. It's not at all about making students with low academic achievement equal to higher achievers-- it's strictly about making poorer families more equal to richer families, by returning to them some measure of the parental right to educational determination that has been taken from them by compulsory schooling laws.
Subsidizing poorer families in this way is socialist, but it's not collectivist.
I acknowledge that the biggest and best counter-argument is about the expense and difficulty of special ed programs. But I think the best solution here is simply to have massive extra subsidies specifically for special ed programs. Again, special ed costs can be socialized without special ed programs being housed within a collectivized generic public school system.
Fundamentally, *all* sped kids and 504 kids have far more legal rights than non-sped kids. In addition, severely disabled kids wildly skew the cost of education per kid. The cost of educating the average child is much, much less than the average cost of educating a child. We make no distinction between the rights of kids with "soft" learning disabilities (dyslexia, executive function, adhd), kids with physical disabilities and no intellectual disabilities (wheelchair, blind), kids with mild intellectual disabilities (familial retardatipn, or low IQs from 60-80), autistic kids who can read and write but will never achieve independence and can't reason or think, only follow, and kids who would rudely be called vegetables and have two paras daily, get changed twice or more times in school, and have no hope of even basic education. All covered under sped.
There's no evidence that accommodations help with "soft" learning disabilities, but lord knows they have irritating and demanding parents. The only two groups who should get some form of rights are the low IQs and the physical but not intellectual disabilities, and these are both relatively small groups. The last two groups cost in general over $100K per child and should not be part of the education system, but are and only are because of federal law. States would categorically remove these protections--still provide services, but not through schools--were it not for the education law.
The courts, up to the supreme court, are insanely solicitous of these rights, always rule in favor of the parents, and always cost the schools and thus states more money.
"lord knows they have irritating and demanding parents"
Simply by virtue of being a mom across the street from the school, I used to substitute regularly many years ago, and found myself in over my head in a number of special-ed situations. There was a great need for SPED subs as I guess most refused the assignment. I didn't want to myself (zero training!), aware that I wasn't gifted with the qualities of the (mostly) women who did that all day every day. But I began to feel they had no one else to ask, so the days added up. I felt I had really gotten myself in a pickle, and would ponder that when doing such things as standing in a boys' bathroom stall with a child they were trying to potty train; my role was to keep the boy glued to the toilet. I remember once he jumped up and ran out and I followed back to the room, apologizing but assuming the session was over. They actually had me return to the bathroom with him, make him sit for 15 minutes or whatever. That was their chief goal, to potty train him. That was the job, and the greatest thing they could do for him and for his hapless parents, who had elected to have a quantity of children. I never saw any success.
I was bored to tears but the ladies were really interested in those kids (!). They didn't seem to feel like Sisyphus. They didn't mind being more or less confined in one room all day, pleading with this rather random set of kids, no two alike in disability or capacity (these included autism but not ADHD or Tourette's or ED, being rather kids for whom this and only this was their classroom) - to do some work or activity. They were so patient. [I remember one time a parent sent a chiding note that this one great big boy's diaper had been put on backward the previous day and I knew it had been my mistake and felt chagrined and also vexed about the scolding (this child we spoon fed baby food; he was not simple mentally disabled, I think he maybe didn't have all of his brain? He couldn't focus visually or of course speak; it was a real challenge to figure out what to do with him all day. Sometimes we'd sort of bat a ball on a tether at him as this kinda produced a smile or some noises. I would accompany him on a shambling sort of walk and the sight of the flags beating in the wind always drew his attention. There was not a personality there, obviously, unless the occasional attention to motion constituted one; so in retrospect it seems rather sweet that the other children, at least those who could talk, spoke his name in a manner suggesting they saw him just as another one of their little band).]
I just remember - and I wouldn't have felt this way if I hadn't spent all that time in the special ed room of that school - being very miffed one evening, when another parent, not from our school, a rather big mouth local guy, stood up at a district meeting held in the cafeteria, and railed in general terms at what he deemed the total failure of the district's special ed program, because of his sample size of one, his son - with Down's syndrome - who was able to attend a mainstream classroom - and wasn't being challenged enough, or didn't have a curriculum tailored to his needs and he could be doing more or something. I remember his being annoyed that the 18+ kids were taught things like riding the bus, and I think he thought this was selling special ed kids like his son short. Or maybe it was the opposite and he thought they should be sent off on the bus by themselves. I dunno, perhaps he was right about certain things, but I can't recall.
Anyway. I just listened to his ranting about how terrible all the special ed was, and needing more money, so as to produce different outcomes somehow; and thought about those women who toiled away in that room, who seemed to me quite selfless, at least in comparison to myself.
Your parenthetical is why I really think we need to limit special ed. First, the teachers simply don’t have the same job description and second, these kids should be institutionalized.
I agree, although I’m sorry if the insertion suggested I thought his parents were demanding. I would not have looked to school if I were in their position, but I did admire them for caring for him at home (which they did very well; later on, I’d see his father bringing him along on errands in the community). Public school was the very awkward enabler of that in his and other such cases, I suppose. I don’t think the setting was the correct one but I don’t see progressives moving off their position on that ever.
Former board president of a private school, here, with kids who attended both private schools and public charters. I can confirm a lot of what Freddie asserts here, though I have a few nits to pick:
-- Yes, people select private schools and charters because they are looking for a better student body. Exclusion is definitely a selling point. Parents will tell you that the selection is _self_-selecting: you get a better class of people because they are people who share the school's values, emphasis, etc. But honestly, most of the selection is socioeconomic -- you can't send your kids to a charter in my state unless you have the time to drive them there.
-- Yes, private school teachers and public charter teachers are looking for a better work environment and willing to take a pay cut for it. However, a HUGE selling point for them is that they often have more control over the curriculum and how it's taught than they have in the public schools. Nearly every teacher in my kids' charter high school started in the public schools, and shifted to charters because "they wouldn't let me teach effectively".
-- In my state (NC) voucher money is only available to those under a certain income level, which tends to short-circuit the argument that vouchers will inflate private-school tuitions.
Personally, I don't have a problem with schools being selective based on talent and behavior. I think it would work a lot better if education system recognized what Freddie says about the distribution of talent and interest, and made different opportunities available for the entire spectrum of talent. Not everyone needs a college degree; not only that, not everyone needs to learn algebra. Selectively give opportunities at higher learning to those who are capable of it; the rest will be better served with vocational training, "life-skills" training, apprenticeships and the like.
Wow. It's almost like you think that this never occurred to anyone before, like that wasn't what school was in the past, and that there's a reason why it's not like that anymore.
And perhaps--I mean, just spitballing--if you understood why schools were forced to changed, you'd realize how completely irrelevant it is that personally, you don't have a problem with the massive racial skews that would appear if schools went back to what they used to do, which you don't seem to understand was once the case, because there's this activity called lawsuits, and court cases, and the courts did indeed care.
So the correct suggestion is not "hey, I don't personally have a problem" because no one gives a shit but rather "hey, is it possible that the current court composition would allow us to sort despite the racial skews"?
Sort of wild that you assume that selectivity based on talent and behavior requires selectivity based on race, and equally wild that you think that schools are the solution to the problem of racial inequality when we've had integrated schools for two generations and whoops! Still have racism and racial disparities.
Pretty clear that you do, dude. Or, alternately, you're just saying stuff you don't mean in the post I responded to, which is weird because you got SO ANGRY in it.
Why would anyone think that some random commenter was angry? I was sarcastic.
So you have nothing much to say other than project what you're convinced my opinions are (wrong) and what my mood is (wrong). So best go find someone stupid to talk to. More your speed.
I'm not sure how your randomness makes your obvious hostility less apparent, but the clue was your use of sarcasm, your implication that the person you were responding to was an idiot, and your general aggrieved tone. I guess you could be a dickhead as a baseline, but it seems more likely (and more generous to you) that you are particularly irritated by the other poster's attitude and beliefs rather than just indiscriminately hostile.
"One important point about American education that I think often goes under the radar: private school teachers, in general, get paid less than their public school counterparts."
One question I have is how many of those low-paying private schools are religious? Part of why I ask is that I can easily see religion as a reason why a teacher would forgo higher pay in favor of what they might consider a calling from God (much as, say, a pastor might). Also, the schools that pay less might also be targeting parents who are devout but not rich, and who have an interest in sending their children somewhere where there are supposedly fewer immoral or secular influences.
My dad was a teacher at a parochial school and it was a good work environment but the teachers would've stabbed each other in the face with a broken bottle for a chance to work in the public school system. Higher pay and (as compared to their current employer) essentially zero chance of being fired. It was very difficult to break into that. (Also, rich school district.)
I teach at a private school because the kids are well behaved, understand the value of what I'm teaching, and are way safer to be around. They're also generally nice people, because we boot out the mean ones. It's worth the (huge) pay cut because I don't hate my life and my job.
One surprising fact about “good schools” is that they can hamper a kids performance. Kids who compete against stronger students think of themselves as less intelligent and therefore aim lower in terms of college and careers than those with more mediocre peers.
This is a rare miss, Freddie. You're right about your core points, obviously, but quite frankly poverty vs. wealth is not the tool we use to measure whether a kid should be in a given school. I teach at a private school and we give a ton of financial aid.
What we're looking for is attitude, parental relationships, culture fit, and the ability to do the work. All of these do, in fact, map to class and therefore have some relationship to wealth, but we'll take the lower end of Verblen's leisure class, the actual distressed millionaires and the children of teachers whose parents were wealthy businesspeople, and we're thrilled to have them. Their having money is, if anything, annoying, and contributes to the entitlement of parents who are used to buying whatever they please.
A voucher would allow us to stabilize our student body, keeping kids who we like and want to keep even in times of family crisis or widespread economic uncertainty. It would make it so that we weren't first on the chopping block when parents are looking at their budget in fear of the future. We'd still keep out the kids who aren't going to be fun to teach with other methods, from admissions to expulsion, so if anything it would be great if money wasn't a factor.
Private school admins like the money coming in and don't care where it is coming from. They like when students have good attitudes. I basically don't have to use my hard-earned classroom management skills in my space, because kids just do what I tell them to do. It's a miracle that I have taken a good 40,000 dollar pay cut (in comparison to not-so-distant public schools) to get, and I don't have many regrets. As long as that stays the same my school is happy, I'm happy, the kids and their parents are happy.
I guarantee if you have kids who are going to get rejected generally, they'll get rejected whether they can pay or not. If you've got kids we like, odds are we're already down for giving them financial aid, and having to do that less is good for the school. If your argument was that it's a waste for the taxpayer, since a lot of people you imagine benefiting still won't get into my school, then you'd be right. As it is, though, I think you're mistaken about the perspective of the school even if you aren't about other things.
Now, PARENTS on the other hand, they might not want their kids to know any poors. That definitely happens
Public education leadership is dominated by people, like Freddie, owning a mindset favoring a socialist utopia... with the slogan "from those that can, to those that cannot".
So, I always point out the disingenuousness of those expressed values with respect to how public education is run.
Because this mindset should translate to a "school of one" approach... where everyone is allotted resources commensurate with their needs and abilities. The highly academically gifted with tremendous parental stability and resources would have high abilities and low needs and hence would command fewer resources. The academically struggling kid from a broken family living in crime-ridden community should be deemed to have low abilities and high needs... and hence require more resources.
But even with all the virtue signaling collectivists in education, the system runs as an almost pure meritocracy. And adding insult to injury, to try and compensate for the deserved guilt, they hand out participation trophy grades and diplomas to these low capability, high needs kids... and launch them into a life of low socioeconomic outcomes... and then claim it is the fault of the parents for not providing enough discipline, or the GOP for resisting spending even more money even though the US spends more per pupil than all other countries.
The solution isn't spending more. And the solution isn't taking from the capable and low-needs students to give more to the less capable, high-needs students. The solution is to change the mission of education to be
TO PREPARE EACH AND EVERY STUDENT TO HIS/HER NEXT STEP TOWARD THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF AN ECONOMIC SELF-SUFFICIENT LIFE.
We need a very high-differentiation approach to public education instead of lumping kids into an ever-shrinking list of groups that stigmatize and fail to meet the real education need. If a kid comes to school not having eaten, then he needs to be fed. If a kid comes to school and cannot behave because of the lack of discipline in his home, then he needs to be in a boot-camp style program. If a kid is academically gifted, he needs to be in an AP program where she is challenged at higher levels.
Fuck "special needs" as a label... all students have special needs.
I invite you to do the actual work. I teach in urban public schools. I quit once after my second death threat from eight graders who had access to guns. You explain to your wife while it’s okay to risk the life of her child’s father for these people. I’m back now and proudly teaching at a charter. We are facing things that would make you cry. You deal with violence and abuse every day. Let me know how it goes. You liberals in your comfortable places had your part in creating this. As I see children I love choose gang crime over school - I choose them. I will do what is in my power to help. You just write words on a computer. I’ve been paid for if to. But don’t believe you are helping anyone. You’re. not. Spend on day as a substitute teacher then write to us.
Freddie has worked in schools and I'm pretty sure he has stories of having to physically protect some of the smaller teachers from students who would throw desks. I can see the essay in my head, just not enough of it to google. Maybe someone else can find the citation.
I really like your definition of school quality: “as defined as the ability to manipulate quantitative metrics and relative placement in the performance distribution!”
You mention that school voucher programs have had a terrible record. Can you or anyone point me to research on this?
Freddie: Congrats on becoming a father (eventually they sleep through the night). I agree with your point "I personally believe that school quality (as defined as the ability to manipulate quantitative metrics and relative placement in the performance distribution!) is largely illusory". I would be interested in your perspective on teaching quality being defined as the time it takes to learn a particular skill. Granted students all have different aptitudes and work ethics, but will different teaching methods teach similar students faster? Perhaps you could address this topic in a future article. Thanks
This is probably the top question I’ve had regarding Freddie’s education perspective as well.
Anecdotally, as a musician who provides private (1-1) instruction, tutoring is likely the broad answer to “most effective method to transfer knowledge and assess skill development”, but I don’t know what the the most “efficient” answer is at scale. Granted, private instructors have different pedagogical methods themselves, so there’s a large variable for variation in instruction quality. And this combines with student aptitude and work ethic (you cannot force a student who doesn’t want to be there to learn music). But tutoring is the most direct way I know of to cultivate skill development with a noticeable increase in quality over time (dedicated musicians who may have a lower aptitude than high-talent musicians, but who consistently apply knowledge attained through tutoring, will achieve a higher skill floor and greater performance success on average).
Teaching quality should also be defined by how pleasant it is for the student to learn.
I'm a tutor. I have some students with truly incompetent teachers; they learn anyway, partly because they get help from people like me. But they suffer in the process.
Students generally know how well they "should" perform. And they're pretty good at converting overperformance into additional leisure, or correcting underperformance with additional effort.
Our experience with charters was bad.
We moved to an area with highly rated schools. What we didn't know was that when we moved in, our local public school had suddenly got rezoned and a stealth housing project was added in.
A charter opened up nearby and we went there. At first it was great, even for our special needs children. It was like a private school.
But then someone informed the charter how they would get more money if they recruited kids from the poor areas and suddenly the school changed. We put our kids back in public school.
The public school, in an effort to keep families, created specialized schools, and it worked well enough.
As to private schools, we did try that for a year with our youngest. Most of the teachers (underpaid and unlicensed) taught there so they could get tuition reductions. Quality was not great.
I've probably held every single opinion about education at one point or another in my life, me and my family and my kids attending a variety of public, private, religious, charter, and alternative schools. Whichever one I'm currently engaged with at the moment is typically the one I hate the most at that moment. So right now I hate charters. Like in your experience, they are required to deal with the special needs.
In many cases getting a good education requires the parents to fight the system and advocate for their child, regardless of private/public/charter. (Am I really "supporting the public school system" when I have my kids enrolled there but have to fight with the administration? It feels like a zero-sum game.) Always remember to drop the words "free and appropriate education" into every conversation.
I hate the special needs system in general. I battled with them constantly. I remember one IEP meeting (9th grade in good public school) for my autistic son, where they told me he knew all the material, but struggled with homework, so he was failing. I argued with them that they should test mastery verbally. "We need metrics!" "Isn't the goal to see if he learned the subject?" "No, we need metrics!"
I often had to threaten to sue to get anything done.
If I could I would ban charters, not because they take resources from public schools, but because so many are corrupt and don't do better than the public schools. It won't happen as the politicians would then need to reform the waste in public schools and they are unwilling to take on the teachers union.
We just need to stop pretending everyone can be a doctor or is college material. Make education useful. Teach skills, trades, etc. And accept that some kids can't be helped without larger societal reforms.
If he had an IEP they definitely could have made those accommodations, they just chose not to.
Right. After 13 years of IEP meetings, I want to burn the system to the ground. Most of them, even with well-meaning teachers and staff, were about process not result.
"In many cases getting a good education requires the parents to fight the system and advocate for their child." Absolutely true, afaik. Even just a credible threat of a fight is probably enough. But without that, a school and its kids are hosed.
So when you say "our experience with charters was bad" you mean "we went to charters in the first place to keep the poor kids out, but they started letting in poor kids, so we went back to publics because they sorted the poor kids into specialized schools, so win win".
Don't get me wrong, that's fine, it's just....way to prove Freddie's point.
No. Our school was failing our sons. The charter, at first, was far better than the public schools at special needs. There were plenty of poor kids of all races in the charter, but they lived nearby and the parents were involved.
Once the charter started bringing kids in from 10 miles away, with zero parent involvement, that made the charter school worse in every way. Teachers left. Funds were stolen. My special needs children were bullied by fellow students without any concern by the staff.
Since we were not rich, we decided to go to the least bad option. It was not great, but it was better than the charter, which had just become a tool for maximizing state funds.
The public schools were poorly run. The school district changed zoning to dump poor kids at our elementary school, even though the nearby kids were middle class and lower middle class of all races.
We didn't do the Chinese or French immersion elementary school.
So, no you don't prove any point. Parents try their best for their kids and charters are a false promise, in my experience. Move to the area with the best zoned schools you can afford, not because the teachers are better, but because the parents are involved and care.
Best zoned = more money = fewer poor kids.
That said, I would not support special needs kids with severe intellectual limitations in public schools. They need an entirely different system that should be covered at the state level, not the district level. And if the kids have mild disabilities, I'd remove their protections altogether. No reason to think they do any good to educational outcomes.
So either way, in my policy world, I'd remove the protections you want from public schools and let the states decide what they want to cover based on what they can afford and what works.
Good piece. Two additional dimensions to note are regulation and the exploitative nature of many lower-tier private schools.
A major reason teachers take pay cuts to work in private schools is there is so much less administrative BS and paperwork and trainings they have to do. Some of these voucher programs will come with state entanglements that the schools don't want.
Many voucher systems set aside the first batch of funds to go to families below a certain income level, with any excess to everyone else. There is rarely excess; it would be too expensive. And those kids generally can't get into the elite private schools. So it has the effect of subsidizing the fly-by-night private schools that, as a rule, (i) don't provide better education than public schools, (ii) are able to exploit parents financially in ways other schools don't, and (iii) don't have anywhere near the resources to handle behavioral and special ed needs that public school systems have.
As an example of (ii), a mother I knew was looking for a lawyer to get out of a contract. Her daughter got into a bad situation at the school partly due to the incompetence of the staff. The mother pulled the daughter out in March, but the fine print on a contract they'd signed said that if the daughter was in school on January, the parents automatically owed tuition for the following school year. Many of these schools are basically reenacting the for-profit college scam, but they have better access to taxpayer funds because the states can't gatekeep as well as USDOE.
"public funds should be used for public schools, not private enterprise"
so, should government be prohibited from paying money to private companies to achieve other objectives...like no private military contractors, etc? this seems like a decent slogan, but not a very meaningful principle if it mainly applies in the education space.
Private military contractors have to follow the law, which is not nearly as demanding as ed law.
Can you explain more about what you mean?
Freddie went into great detail about the laws that public schools have to follow that private schools don't. So giving public funds to schools that don't follow those laws in no small part because they are maximizing profit (as they should, as businesses) is a problem because they don't follow those laws.
There are two implications here that I find questionable:
1. private businesses performing public functions should follow the same rules as government employees.
2. private schools are "maximizing profit" -- this is actually not true of all private enterprises and definitely not true of most private schools. there are lots of other reasons private citizens do things.
But most importantly, Freddie didn't say "public funds should be used for public schools unless private enterprise follows the same rules"...but maybe that's what he meant.
1. they absolutely should, particularly if the reason the public schools cost so much is because they have to follow those laws.
2. That's absurd.
That is what he meant, I'm fairly sure.
"The answer, of course, is that private schools screen out the hardest-to-educate kids, making the job of a teacher much more attractive."
I'm too stubborn a socialist to take a job in a private school, but here in the UK I did have to undertake a term of my training in a very fancy private boarding school (with, I must admit, gorgeous grounds and some very friendly teachers). The kids were indeed far, far easier to teach than those at the state school on a very deprived estate where I did my other two terms of training and then chose to work. However, what troubled/ completely disenchanted me was my attempts to get help for a dyslexic student (with other challenges) in terms of her ability to engage with my English lessons. I had a meeting with the Head of SEND / Inclusion and they informed me not to worry too much... "she'll be gone within a year".
Basically, the lack of differentiation between 'minus house points' for behaviour and those for lack of attainment in lesson would make it very easy to manage out students.
My son attends a private school that has managed to poach 2 veteran teachers from public schools, despite offering a lot less money. These teachers gush about how happy they are to be at a school that better aligns with their "teaching philosophy."
.... And I'm sure it doesn't hurt that they now work with a small group of students who are universally smart and well-behaved, with pleasant parents who are happy to volunteer.
I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or merely reporting, so apologies - but in a more general way I don’t know why, on a blog and amid a readership sometimes sympathetic to labor, it should draw suspicion that teachers like other workers, prefer decent working conditions.
Not at all, of course I understand them preferring a nice environment. That’s why we send him there!
Also public school seems especially bad these days. My employer has nothing to do with teaching, and ever since Covid we’ve gotten a lot of job applications from public school teachers.
The political climate in some places has become frighteningly hostile to teachers, and teachers are very vulnerable to politics because they work with the public for the government. I wouldn't be surprised if those teachers were fleeing from parents and/or elected leaders.
It’s interesting - in my experience the private school parents can be very demanding, “I’m not paying $50k a year for a B now am I?” And working on a year to year contract one unhappy parent (who is also a donor) and you’re out on your ass.
It seemed a lot more customer service focused than a public school teacher would be comfortable with.
We have a nice sweet spot because it’s Montessori, so you don’t get the intense prep school parents. Tends to attract people like me who value a pleasant and nurturing environment above everything.
And the tuition is relatively low for a private school, nowhere near 50k.
Likely they retired and are collecting pensions or have spouses with better benefits and better pay. Or they just moved and couldn't get hired because they were too old.
No one. Seriously, no one. who requires income or wants security picks private over public.
And I don't know what this planet is where teachers like volunteer parents. Zorkon?
Finally, most suburban schools are filled with smart and well-behaved kids and pay twice as much.
Then why are they always asking us to volunteer?? They seem happy when I say yes. 🤷🏻♀️
I was referring to public schools. Private schools, who knows.
That said, I also teach high school, so maybe elementary school teachers want parents.
Yep it's elementary. They always want parents to come on the field trips, in particular. (And there are a ton of field trips; apparently Maria Montessori believed in getting out of the classroom or something)
I think Maria was on to something! I find my memories of school are chiefly those field trip days, which I think were much more common then?*
We would (be told to dress for) and go to e.g. the symphony. We went to the paper factory, got Mead swag! Went to the popcorn factory. To the newspaper plant and the TV station. We all rode the train to the ice cream factory in another town. It was exciting to be *given* a scoop of ice cream at the end of the tour, but rivalling it was the train ride, my first. There was a water cooler with paper cones, also a novelty to us; we all kept moving forward to slake our sudden bottomless thirst with a new cone, until the teacher finally said Stop. It. We went to the fat stock show. We went to the Natural History museum/planetarium so often that I made a familiar beeline for the grizzly bear, taxidermied in a threateningly erect posture. We went to the State Capitol and the home of the Hero. Those of us with near-perfect attendance or good grades went to the amusement park in May!
In middle school we went on a geology/fossil hunting expedition overnight.
I was sad that the field trips mostly died out in high school, but we did have a marvelous biology teacher, Ms. Doris Countee, who took us out to the Gulf to collect specimens for our tanks, and to the sea turtle rescue place and onto the research vessel, and another time to the operating theater and cadaver room at the Medical Center.
*A friend of mine attended high school in a county usually described as the poorest in the nation, in competition with the neighboring county. Perhaps 50 years ago it was not so poor. But her senior field trip trumped all of mine: they went to the mountains in Mexico where the monarchs' breeding ground had recently been discovered, to tag butterflies.
A public school did this. It was another world.
My sense is that their spouses make good money.
Also (I forgot about this when I commented) when I was a kid, my mom taught public in an affluent suburb and came home crying often and quit halfway through the year. Because of behavior problems and lack of administration support. Then she took a huge pay cut to teach preschool until retirement.
My dad’s income made this possible, but leaving public for a better work environment is definitely a thing.
It's a thing, but it's not *the* thing, and it's not among the top dozen things. But that's obvious because coming home crying after a day in an affluent suburban school is clearly someone who can't handle much at all. Good thing she married someone who could make a living.
The school put all of the struggling students in one classroom -- special ed, autism, behavior problems, academically behind -- and expected her to figure it out. Students who had meltdowns and got physical were put right back into class. I'd have been crying too!
I did two years in a suburban (not affluent) district and I was that teacher. It was my specialty when I taught, but I was never so unsupported as that school. In the inner city district where I spent most of my teaching career, every teacher in my building knew my kids and would support them. In the suburban district you'd think we all had cooties.
Tell your mom she did a good thing. She believed in kids who needed it, when they needed it.
I ended up leaving teaching after just short of a decade and now I work remotely in tech. There's a huge mental and physical toll with that work, and it is a young person's game. I could not have switched to pre-school! Those adorable little munchkins are agents of chaos.
I don't think you're wrong about this. Many of these considerations were part of my family's decision to go to Catholic school instead of a perfectly fine public school. It's important to us for our kids to be immersed in an environment of in tact families who all give a f*ck. We can revisit the issue again in high school.
It's worth noting that public schools themselves, particularly the really good ones, also operate this kind of shell game. They do it based on the real estate market and restrictive zoning. This is softer and less express than what private schools do, but it's the same outcome. People pick the private school for the same reason they pick the public school that happens to be located in the solidly upper middle class or above neighborhood full of nice people who protect their turf via aggressive NIMBYism and showing up in force to any public consideration of changing boundary lines.
Here's where I will challenge Freddie, because I believe the solution to 'save' public schools from voucher-ization (and to be clear I 100% think we should) the way to do that is to change public schools, maybe a lot, and not in ways a committed leftist might like. Institute hard-core tracking based on objective capabilities. Subject the disruptive to discipline and beyond a certain point reliably segregate them from the mainstream. Maintain robust accommodations for those with documented disabilities and other special needs. You can do all of this stuff in 1 building or at one site if you want to. But I think we all also intuitively know the uncomfortable things doing something like that would reveal about who ends up where, and since we can't stomach that, a lot of places will end up with some shady and/or ramshackle voucher system.
I sincerely believe that if schools could "reliably segregate [the disruptive] from the mainstream," it would solve at least a third if not half of the actual problems, and a solid 75% of the PR problems, of public schools. Parents are scared to send their children to classes where they will not be protected from (real, physical, not ideological or metaphorical) violence. They will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, either in private school tuition or in buying a more expensive house in a nicer school district, to protect their child from being in a class with even one habitual chair-thrower, and I don't think they're wrong to do so.
My kids go to the top public schools in our state and there is a premium for housing. Teachers beg to come to the schools because they have less issues. The schools get half the funding of schools in poor areas, but parents pay a lot out-of-pocket.
The other "good part" of our metro has most of the kids in private or charter schools. Parents don't trust the schools so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, at what point is a child permanently banished (fuck your “segregated” euphemism) from your “reformed” public school system? Does the child receive due process first? If the due process goes awry, will everyone involved be sufficiently punished (i.e. sent to prison)?
Your ideal will never materialize, if you can’t be ACCOUNTABLE for it here, where the stakes are low, because, fortunately, you are just another fundie troll who rants from behind a screen name.
Lol well you sound like a pleasant person!
And no, of course you don't need due process to remove the perpetually disruptive from regular classrooms and yes, of course there should always be a path back for those willing to take it. Speaking of screeching at the world from behind computers, I'm always amazed by how much those who demand endless accountability and accommodation seem impervious to the idea that others might reasonably ask for a bit of the same of them.
No due process is the epitome of no accountability and accommodation. Your “perpetually disruptive” student may be reacting to bullies at the school, who are not being held accountable. Or, they could be living with a disability that the school has not FULLY accommodated. What if the allegations against them are entirely fabricated, because the school doesn’t want a Black/LGBTQ/fill-in-the-demographic student there, no matter how well they behave? That’s why due process is essential. Schools fail everyday. If their failures are not exposed and punished, innocent children and families will suffer.
You'll find most neighbourhoods have the same few kids being 'disruptive' since elementary school level.
Also having a disability make you MORE disruptive does not mean you're a good student or person. We had a kid with bi polar disorder in our class, and he got a lot of sympathy for that. What people did not know, because they made the assumption that because he had a disability he was a good person, was that he was a little sociopath, who played manipulation games and when ever he was challenged on it hid behind his mental health status.
Things are more grey than they look sometimes.
“Bad” people deserve due process, too. Schools are not above the law.
I don’t know how much pruning charter schools do, nor how successfully given that their products don’t much graduate from college, the putative goal.
But if this is supposedly a class issue - charter schools and their off-putting ad hoc facilities are definitely déclassé.
This is quite a perceptive article -- and for me, it underscores why I'm in favor of more school choice.
When parents desire to remove their children from schools that they don't like, I think they should have the power to do so. Yes, sometimes their reasons for disliking a school are morally wrong (most commonly, racism). But often their reasons are entirely reasonable and virtuous -- saving their child from being victimized by criminals; escaping abusive teachers and administrators; seeking better academic resources.
But more fundamentally, I consider that choice to be *in principle* a power to be exercised by parents, not a power held by "society" or the state. The choice of how and where to educate children is a core parental right, and it should be ceded to government as little as possible.
This is an old saw from the school choice movement, but only because it's true: the rich have always had school choice, and they always will. School choice as a movement is about finding ways to spread that privilege to poorer people by making school choice cheaper.
To me, that's the axis along which the talk of "fairness" and "equality" makes sense. It's not at all about making students with low academic achievement equal to higher achievers-- it's strictly about making poorer families more equal to richer families, by returning to them some measure of the parental right to educational determination that has been taken from them by compulsory schooling laws.
Subsidizing poorer families in this way is socialist, but it's not collectivist.
I acknowledge that the biggest and best counter-argument is about the expense and difficulty of special ed programs. But I think the best solution here is simply to have massive extra subsidies specifically for special ed programs. Again, special ed costs can be socialized without special ed programs being housed within a collectivized generic public school system.
The best solution is to repeal the special ed law.
Could you expand on that? I honestly don't know much about the laws.
You can read about some of the details here, in this 10 year old research piece I did on the subject. The cost differentials have only gotten greater.
https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/education-policy-proposal-3-repeal-idea/
Fundamentally, *all* sped kids and 504 kids have far more legal rights than non-sped kids. In addition, severely disabled kids wildly skew the cost of education per kid. The cost of educating the average child is much, much less than the average cost of educating a child. We make no distinction between the rights of kids with "soft" learning disabilities (dyslexia, executive function, adhd), kids with physical disabilities and no intellectual disabilities (wheelchair, blind), kids with mild intellectual disabilities (familial retardatipn, or low IQs from 60-80), autistic kids who can read and write but will never achieve independence and can't reason or think, only follow, and kids who would rudely be called vegetables and have two paras daily, get changed twice or more times in school, and have no hope of even basic education. All covered under sped.
There's no evidence that accommodations help with "soft" learning disabilities, but lord knows they have irritating and demanding parents. The only two groups who should get some form of rights are the low IQs and the physical but not intellectual disabilities, and these are both relatively small groups. The last two groups cost in general over $100K per child and should not be part of the education system, but are and only are because of federal law. States would categorically remove these protections--still provide services, but not through schools--were it not for the education law.
The courts, up to the supreme court, are insanely solicitous of these rights, always rule in favor of the parents, and always cost the schools and thus states more money.
"lord knows they have irritating and demanding parents"
Simply by virtue of being a mom across the street from the school, I used to substitute regularly many years ago, and found myself in over my head in a number of special-ed situations. There was a great need for SPED subs as I guess most refused the assignment. I didn't want to myself (zero training!), aware that I wasn't gifted with the qualities of the (mostly) women who did that all day every day. But I began to feel they had no one else to ask, so the days added up. I felt I had really gotten myself in a pickle, and would ponder that when doing such things as standing in a boys' bathroom stall with a child they were trying to potty train; my role was to keep the boy glued to the toilet. I remember once he jumped up and ran out and I followed back to the room, apologizing but assuming the session was over. They actually had me return to the bathroom with him, make him sit for 15 minutes or whatever. That was their chief goal, to potty train him. That was the job, and the greatest thing they could do for him and for his hapless parents, who had elected to have a quantity of children. I never saw any success.
I was bored to tears but the ladies were really interested in those kids (!). They didn't seem to feel like Sisyphus. They didn't mind being more or less confined in one room all day, pleading with this rather random set of kids, no two alike in disability or capacity (these included autism but not ADHD or Tourette's or ED, being rather kids for whom this and only this was their classroom) - to do some work or activity. They were so patient. [I remember one time a parent sent a chiding note that this one great big boy's diaper had been put on backward the previous day and I knew it had been my mistake and felt chagrined and also vexed about the scolding (this child we spoon fed baby food; he was not simple mentally disabled, I think he maybe didn't have all of his brain? He couldn't focus visually or of course speak; it was a real challenge to figure out what to do with him all day. Sometimes we'd sort of bat a ball on a tether at him as this kinda produced a smile or some noises. I would accompany him on a shambling sort of walk and the sight of the flags beating in the wind always drew his attention. There was not a personality there, obviously, unless the occasional attention to motion constituted one; so in retrospect it seems rather sweet that the other children, at least those who could talk, spoke his name in a manner suggesting they saw him just as another one of their little band).]
I just remember - and I wouldn't have felt this way if I hadn't spent all that time in the special ed room of that school - being very miffed one evening, when another parent, not from our school, a rather big mouth local guy, stood up at a district meeting held in the cafeteria, and railed in general terms at what he deemed the total failure of the district's special ed program, because of his sample size of one, his son - with Down's syndrome - who was able to attend a mainstream classroom - and wasn't being challenged enough, or didn't have a curriculum tailored to his needs and he could be doing more or something. I remember his being annoyed that the 18+ kids were taught things like riding the bus, and I think he thought this was selling special ed kids like his son short. Or maybe it was the opposite and he thought they should be sent off on the bus by themselves. I dunno, perhaps he was right about certain things, but I can't recall.
Anyway. I just listened to his ranting about how terrible all the special ed was, and needing more money, so as to produce different outcomes somehow; and thought about those women who toiled away in that room, who seemed to me quite selfless, at least in comparison to myself.
Your parenthetical is why I really think we need to limit special ed. First, the teachers simply don’t have the same job description and second, these kids should be institutionalized.
I agree, although I’m sorry if the insertion suggested I thought his parents were demanding. I would not have looked to school if I were in their position, but I did admire them for caring for him at home (which they did very well; later on, I’d see his father bringing him along on errands in the community). Public school was the very awkward enabler of that in his and other such cases, I suppose. I don’t think the setting was the correct one but I don’t see progressives moving off their position on that ever.
Former board president of a private school, here, with kids who attended both private schools and public charters. I can confirm a lot of what Freddie asserts here, though I have a few nits to pick:
-- Yes, people select private schools and charters because they are looking for a better student body. Exclusion is definitely a selling point. Parents will tell you that the selection is _self_-selecting: you get a better class of people because they are people who share the school's values, emphasis, etc. But honestly, most of the selection is socioeconomic -- you can't send your kids to a charter in my state unless you have the time to drive them there.
-- Yes, private school teachers and public charter teachers are looking for a better work environment and willing to take a pay cut for it. However, a HUGE selling point for them is that they often have more control over the curriculum and how it's taught than they have in the public schools. Nearly every teacher in my kids' charter high school started in the public schools, and shifted to charters because "they wouldn't let me teach effectively".
-- In my state (NC) voucher money is only available to those under a certain income level, which tends to short-circuit the argument that vouchers will inflate private-school tuitions.
Personally, I don't have a problem with schools being selective based on talent and behavior. I think it would work a lot better if education system recognized what Freddie says about the distribution of talent and interest, and made different opportunities available for the entire spectrum of talent. Not everyone needs a college degree; not only that, not everyone needs to learn algebra. Selectively give opportunities at higher learning to those who are capable of it; the rest will be better served with vocational training, "life-skills" training, apprenticeships and the like.
Wow. It's almost like you think that this never occurred to anyone before, like that wasn't what school was in the past, and that there's a reason why it's not like that anymore.
And perhaps--I mean, just spitballing--if you understood why schools were forced to changed, you'd realize how completely irrelevant it is that personally, you don't have a problem with the massive racial skews that would appear if schools went back to what they used to do, which you don't seem to understand was once the case, because there's this activity called lawsuits, and court cases, and the courts did indeed care.
So the correct suggestion is not "hey, I don't personally have a problem" because no one gives a shit but rather "hey, is it possible that the current court composition would allow us to sort despite the racial skews"?
Sort of wild that you assume that selectivity based on talent and behavior requires selectivity based on race, and equally wild that you think that schools are the solution to the problem of racial inequality when we've had integrated schools for two generations and whoops! Still have racism and racial disparities.
I don't assume the first nor think the second. Wrong twice. Whoops!
Pretty clear that you do, dude. Or, alternately, you're just saying stuff you don't mean in the post I responded to, which is weird because you got SO ANGRY in it.
Why would anyone think that some random commenter was angry? I was sarcastic.
So you have nothing much to say other than project what you're convinced my opinions are (wrong) and what my mood is (wrong). So best go find someone stupid to talk to. More your speed.
I'm not sure how your randomness makes your obvious hostility less apparent, but the clue was your use of sarcasm, your implication that the person you were responding to was an idiot, and your general aggrieved tone. I guess you could be a dickhead as a baseline, but it seems more likely (and more generous to you) that you are particularly irritated by the other poster's attitude and beliefs rather than just indiscriminately hostile.
"One important point about American education that I think often goes under the radar: private school teachers, in general, get paid less than their public school counterparts."
One question I have is how many of those low-paying private schools are religious? Part of why I ask is that I can easily see religion as a reason why a teacher would forgo higher pay in favor of what they might consider a calling from God (much as, say, a pastor might). Also, the schools that pay less might also be targeting parents who are devout but not rich, and who have an interest in sending their children somewhere where there are supposedly fewer immoral or secular influences.
My dad was a teacher at a parochial school and it was a good work environment but the teachers would've stabbed each other in the face with a broken bottle for a chance to work in the public school system. Higher pay and (as compared to their current employer) essentially zero chance of being fired. It was very difficult to break into that. (Also, rich school district.)
I teach at a private school because the kids are well behaved, understand the value of what I'm teaching, and are way safer to be around. They're also generally nice people, because we boot out the mean ones. It's worth the (huge) pay cut because I don't hate my life and my job.
One surprising fact about “good schools” is that they can hamper a kids performance. Kids who compete against stronger students think of themselves as less intelligent and therefore aim lower in terms of college and careers than those with more mediocre peers.
Respectfully, are you sure about this? Do you have a citation? I've never met someone who said, "I (or my kid) is average, so we'll aim low."
This is a rare miss, Freddie. You're right about your core points, obviously, but quite frankly poverty vs. wealth is not the tool we use to measure whether a kid should be in a given school. I teach at a private school and we give a ton of financial aid.
What we're looking for is attitude, parental relationships, culture fit, and the ability to do the work. All of these do, in fact, map to class and therefore have some relationship to wealth, but we'll take the lower end of Verblen's leisure class, the actual distressed millionaires and the children of teachers whose parents were wealthy businesspeople, and we're thrilled to have them. Their having money is, if anything, annoying, and contributes to the entitlement of parents who are used to buying whatever they please.
A voucher would allow us to stabilize our student body, keeping kids who we like and want to keep even in times of family crisis or widespread economic uncertainty. It would make it so that we weren't first on the chopping block when parents are looking at their budget in fear of the future. We'd still keep out the kids who aren't going to be fun to teach with other methods, from admissions to expulsion, so if anything it would be great if money wasn't a factor.
Private school admins like the money coming in and don't care where it is coming from. They like when students have good attitudes. I basically don't have to use my hard-earned classroom management skills in my space, because kids just do what I tell them to do. It's a miracle that I have taken a good 40,000 dollar pay cut (in comparison to not-so-distant public schools) to get, and I don't have many regrets. As long as that stays the same my school is happy, I'm happy, the kids and their parents are happy.
I guarantee if you have kids who are going to get rejected generally, they'll get rejected whether they can pay or not. If you've got kids we like, odds are we're already down for giving them financial aid, and having to do that less is good for the school. If your argument was that it's a waste for the taxpayer, since a lot of people you imagine benefiting still won't get into my school, then you'd be right. As it is, though, I think you're mistaken about the perspective of the school even if you aren't about other things.
Now, PARENTS on the other hand, they might not want their kids to know any poors. That definitely happens
Public education leadership is dominated by people, like Freddie, owning a mindset favoring a socialist utopia... with the slogan "from those that can, to those that cannot".
So, I always point out the disingenuousness of those expressed values with respect to how public education is run.
Because this mindset should translate to a "school of one" approach... where everyone is allotted resources commensurate with their needs and abilities. The highly academically gifted with tremendous parental stability and resources would have high abilities and low needs and hence would command fewer resources. The academically struggling kid from a broken family living in crime-ridden community should be deemed to have low abilities and high needs... and hence require more resources.
But even with all the virtue signaling collectivists in education, the system runs as an almost pure meritocracy. And adding insult to injury, to try and compensate for the deserved guilt, they hand out participation trophy grades and diplomas to these low capability, high needs kids... and launch them into a life of low socioeconomic outcomes... and then claim it is the fault of the parents for not providing enough discipline, or the GOP for resisting spending even more money even though the US spends more per pupil than all other countries.
The solution isn't spending more. And the solution isn't taking from the capable and low-needs students to give more to the less capable, high-needs students. The solution is to change the mission of education to be
TO PREPARE EACH AND EVERY STUDENT TO HIS/HER NEXT STEP TOWARD THE ULTIMATE GOAL OF AN ECONOMIC SELF-SUFFICIENT LIFE.
We need a very high-differentiation approach to public education instead of lumping kids into an ever-shrinking list of groups that stigmatize and fail to meet the real education need. If a kid comes to school not having eaten, then he needs to be fed. If a kid comes to school and cannot behave because of the lack of discipline in his home, then he needs to be in a boot-camp style program. If a kid is academically gifted, he needs to be in an AP program where she is challenged at higher levels.
Fuck "special needs" as a label... all students have special needs.
That's quite close to my perspective. Socialism doesn't have to mean collectivism. But few socialists seem to consider this.
Freddie has written dozens of essays and a few books about education. Besides "schools good" it's tough to put him into a box.
I'm not the one to try to summarize them but these are good places to start
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-basics-school-reform
I invite you to do the actual work. I teach in urban public schools. I quit once after my second death threat from eight graders who had access to guns. You explain to your wife while it’s okay to risk the life of her child’s father for these people. I’m back now and proudly teaching at a charter. We are facing things that would make you cry. You deal with violence and abuse every day. Let me know how it goes. You liberals in your comfortable places had your part in creating this. As I see children I love choose gang crime over school - I choose them. I will do what is in my power to help. You just write words on a computer. I’ve been paid for if to. But don’t believe you are helping anyone. You’re. not. Spend on day as a substitute teacher then write to us.
Freddie has worked in schools and I'm pretty sure he has stories of having to physically protect some of the smaller teachers from students who would throw desks. I can see the essay in my head, just not enough of it to google. Maybe someone else can find the citation.
Here you go: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/from-the-archives-physical-restraint-as-the-least-bad-option
Jesus that's still such a hard read.
I really like your definition of school quality: “as defined as the ability to manipulate quantitative metrics and relative placement in the performance distribution!”
You mention that school voucher programs have had a terrible record. Can you or anyone point me to research on this?