It was my experience (one kid in high-performing suburban public schools, two in a highly academic Catholic school) that no one school can provide a complete package of education, given that all kids have different strengths, weaknesses, and interests. The Catholic school excelled at reading, math and humanities--the students got a lot more history and of course religion content. Science was taught, but there were no facilities so once they got into middle school it wasn't as good as the science classes offered at the public middle school. Music was a weakness as well. The school worked really hard to keep tuition as affordable as possible so subjects that required labs or specialty equipment like musical instruments and a dedicated teacher with expertise in that subject had to take second place to the basic "meat and potatoes" K-8 education. The public school was able to offer better music and science, but the math and reading curricula in the early grades was more gimmicky and not as effective--if your kid needed to learn a lot of phonics to unlock the ability to read, it had to be done at home since the school didn't go as deep as some kids needed.
That was just on the school side--on the kid side, we had one who could read but didn't like to, and a reasonably bright kid can do enough to get by without really working very hard at things they dislike. One struggled to organize their writing into coherent paragraphs, and luckily because they were in the Catholic school that spent a LOT of time and focus on teaching their students how to do longer form writing (long papers in middle school) the teacher noticed and worked with them. In public school that level of complexity wasn't expected before high school and so the problem would not have been caught and addressed.
It really depends on the public school. One argument for sending kids to public school (especially high school) is that life will not filter out stupid people, bad people, or disruptive people. Being in a classroom with all walks of humanity allows kids to learn a certain amount of resilience. I do have serious problems with the heavy reliance on screens--but there is probably less harm done in secondary education, especially if a kid has had a pretty traditional elementary education where there aren't many screens.
In our case, the benefits of a big suburban public high school were far greater than the costs, and it allowed us to save a lot of money for college. We had two in a good/above average district and after the K-8 Catholic prep, they did great. The other kid was in a school that had an unusually high percentage of kids whose parents were Asian immigrants here working in tech/engineering. The school was a bit of a pressure cooker, but there was almost no disorder of the kind that you hear so much about today--the parents would never have tolerated it. Our kid worked her ass off to keep up and only really started enjoying the social and club aspects of high school after their junior year. The academics and focus on grades were pretty brutal.
"...no one school can provide a complete package of education."
So true. I went to an outstanding Jesuit high school that was very well rounded in its curriculum. Aside from the obvious moral tenets, it taught great Literature, History, Music, Chemistry, Math, Foreign Language, Debate, etc...even Theater. For instance, I haven't touched chemistry at all since then but still know how to read the periodic table.
What it _didn't_ do well at all really was basic life skills like personal finance, nutrition, or any practical trade skills. The nutrition part I eventually learned on my own, but the financial aspect I could have really used back then. And I ended up getting my bachelors degree in a mostly trade skill industry. Ironically, I remember in college some friends talking about HS shop class and I had to ask them what the hell they were talking about.
My take is that most of the students at my high school not only had wealthy parents (so they didn't need to worry much about money, or their parents taught them that), but most students were expected to go on to non trade-skill prestige careers (which also are mostly high-income).
Perhaps its also harder for students of lower-income parents to get the skills they may need from a private school because those schools tend to assume a lot about both the background and potential of the students attending.
There used to be a very good website by the National Counsel of Mathematics Teachers. Lots of good stuff. I had a program that I really liked called Connected Math. There are a lot of good basics, that aren't all computation. I wanted my kids to learn how to use math for problem solving, not computation.
I'm not impressed with a third grader doing long-division. Most kids that age don't have the ability to do abstract reasoning and in order to really understand what they're doing need concrete things. Long division is an abstract, place value exercise. In my son's calculus class they discussed how non of them remembered how to do long division.
I work at a Mathnasium, and one of the big things I learned as I taught is that fractions and long division are both much harder than the curriculum thinks they are.
There's a sort of baseline assumption that fractions are pretty basic and kids should learn them, but they're objectively more complicated than a lot of stuff we reserve for later grades. So they just don't stick. They have to be retaught again and again.
Not because we explain fractions in such a complex way, but because fractions really are complex under the hood, and we don't really give that complexity the respect it deserves.
Fractions, ratios, percentages, and proportions are all pretty much the same thing and all brutally difficult. Ideally, we'd cover them constantly in seventh and eighth grade. Plenty of complexity for the accelerationist obsessed parents but no, they want their kid not knowing this but in geometry.
The basics of those can be introduced in the younger grades using concrete examples. Fraction circles, apples etc. To really understand and manipulate those concepts a person has to have the ability for abstract reasoning. I remember one teacher who had taught at a lot of grades saying that nothing she did with the fourth graders in fractions etc. stuck no matter how much she worked at it, but in fifth grade they'd get it in a matter of weeks.
I read something recently that there is a big shift in the brain at about 9 years old.
I mean, what else is there to do? It's the same with homelessness, crime, mental illness, all these other subjects of this blog, the disorder that triggers the American selfishness gene is overwhelmingly created by a very small slice of the population, but these are hard problems to deal with that inevitably trade off effectiveness with our notions of fairness and justice.
Nope. Selfish members of powerful groups hoard the resources that anyone needs for an orderly life. There are at least two solutions to all of the problems you mentioned:
1) tax the rich
and 2) prosecute workers in the healthcare, law enforcement, and education industries who have been credibly accused of abusing the people they’re supposed to serve.
You don't have to read very many of Freddie's blog posts to realize that firehosing money at most problems seldom produces solutions. Income inequality I think is a problem that likely has means of improvement that involve the taxation, but its far trickier than the simplistic slogan of tax the rich.
Bullshit, Bernard. The cages you want for all the inconvenient people aren’t cheap. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, per inmate. For a fraction of that money, you could solve virtually all of their problems. You could buy them a house and a car. You could pay for their education. You could set up a retirement fund for them. You could hire domestic help for them. You could ensure that they always had top-tier health insurance.
Vulnerable people aren’t problems. The systems and people that hurt them are problems.
When you use the umbrella term "vulnerable" you strip the agency from everyone you cram under that umbrella and most of the bad school behaviors we're talking about involve agency on the part of those people acting them out.
A significant portion of the disruptive kids I was exposed to in my urban public school experience lived in houses and had cars -- is your argument they just need bigger, more sumptuous homes and better cars?
Once aspect of vulnerability is the inherent limitation on personal agency. If your parents can house you and drive you to school, but they aren’t powerful enough to say “No!” to weekend homework assignments, you are vulnerable. You aren’t allowed to meet your needs for rest and quality time with your family. And, for a young person, that deprivation hits hard. Public schools should not be exploiting families of modest means.
We spent $90M to build a housing development that would get homeless people out of the streets. Most of the people who live their are poor and just need a safe place to live. A few of the people there want to break out all the windows in the stairwell and will probably want to do that no matter how much we spend on them. Those people should be in jail or a mental institution and then the problem of housing the other 95% becomes tractable.
The people who are the most hurt by this situation are not people like me who have to look at burned out and boarded up apartments as we drive by and sometimes have the bus delayed because police and fire are responding to Asteri again. The people who are hurt the most are the vulnerable people who live there... And they really are facing problems like: many unhoused people won't be housed if they can't live with their dog but if they can live with their pitbull it will bite other vulnerable people, not only the other people who live there, but people like my schizophrenic friend.
That’s why cities should be prohibited from letting people rot on the curb for years. The average “bad tenant” has lived unhoused/insecurely housed for over a decade before they land in someplace like Asteri. Their habits for surviving the street won’t disappear the second they’re housed. They won’t disappear in a day, a month, or a year. If a long re-assimilation process is too onerous for you to deal with, you need to support policies that will permanently house people very, very quickly.
North Carolina has been trying to destroy its public school system for some time and it appears, in many cases, to be working for many of the reasons you point out here.
Not only are 10% of our students in charter schools, countless others are now in private schools due to our generous voucher program. And the public schools, who take anyone who shows up, are routinely and roundly criticized by our state legislature for failing their students. We have set up a system in which our public schools are designed to struggle. It also doesn't help that we pay our teachers poorly.
This of course hastens the flight of students whose families have the time and resources to chase the best education for their kids.
It's a pernicious cycle and one I think will be unlikely to be reversed.
And indeed, in my experience, there's a profound ambivalence among a lot of private school people about the idea of universal student vouchers - of course the schools would like access to government money, but they understand that their ability to filter out the “bad kids” is core to their sales pitch and also a key reason their teachers will work for less money.
Yes. The school my youngest two went to for high school doesn't accept vouchers for just that reason.
There is also a lot of parsing that goes on in my world--the Triangle. Almost every Democratic voter and many Independents want to support the public schools. AND, when it's their child/ren, they go to charter or private schools. The attitude is: we'll pay our taxes, even those with surcharges for the public schools, but we won't use them if they're not the best option for our kid/s.
I think it’s moved past that. Many liberals feel that if you vote for bonds, pay your taxes, advocate for the schools, that’s enough. It’s even more complicated for those parents who feel, somewhat justifiably, that their kids, who don’t need extra care in the public schools, are getting lost in the shuffle. Add on to that extremely liberal or conservative school districts that have enacted policies parents fundamentally disagree with. I’m not sure those parents aren’t living up to their principles as much as they are responding to a complicated reality.
To be fair, I briefly went to one of the best public high schools in the state (ECHHS), and there were regularly fights of dozens of students in the hallways. As in, dozens of students at a time all beating on each other that teachers and staff had to break up. Not sure if that's still a problem because I didn't go for very long (dropped out), but it was when I was there.
I am not particularly surprised that my parents, and most others who had the resources to do so, chose private school. And yes, of course this is a structural issue, but it will always be a problem no matter how otherwise just the system is if you have universal mandatory K-12 and no ability to impose meaningful discipline or God forbid, suspend or expel students.
I went to CHHS (during the Obama years - I wonder if we overlapped!) and recall similar incidents. I was very insulated in my Honors/AP/performing arts bubble but you all walk the same halls.
I'm one of those parents. I wanted to support the public middle and high school where my kids did sports, through an independent home study program, which I did in California. They did eventually set up a program but it was one of those awful computer based ones.
I homeschooled my last four kids in the upper grades because the popular culture is toxic. Two of my kids were severely socially damaged because of that culture.
My kids went to community college at 15 and did a lot of extra-curricular stuff. I was also able to give them a better education. They read a lot of books and wrote a lot of essays. I'm a teacher.
No defender of charter schools, but I’ve worked at two of them (Boston and Providence) and, man, how often I wished they did a better job filtering students, like they are accused of doing. The ugly truth is those “bad kids” you described do exist, and they are almost always the rationale families give for sending their kids to charters. But the schools I worked at would never dream of expelling somebody except in extreme circumstances. No matter how much we all wanted it. The other thing charter schools tend to be good at is pumping effort into college admissions. I worked at a school that had 100% college acceptance most years. But it’s bullshit because most kids drop out first semester.
You ever dig into the Success Academy stuff? They certainly went very far. Click that EducationRealist link. The OCR suit was really shocking. (And then it just disappeared.)
Yeah. Charter schools are, on the whole, a bad thing for education, or at least neutral. But I did realize, once I left charters and went to a public high school in receivership (MA), that traditional public schools are hardly exempt from all manner of what I would consider rights violations. They have way less leeway with parent selection, but because they are under less overall surveillance they do all manner of shady business with warehousing bad students internally.
Curious about what you’ve seen re ‘warehousing internally’. In the schools I worked in there was never any durably consistent approach. ‘Detention’ morphed into ‘suspension’ by the early 2000s and that evolved further when the Obama DOE admonished schools about high suspension rates on civil rights grounds. I taught for a long time and spent 4 years in a profoundly stressed inner city MS. I was there when the word on suspension came down from above. The pendulum swung the other way immediately. The dean told me in 2011 that the prin had told her not to suspend any student for fighting until their 3rd offense. Obviously that created as many problems as it solved - or more precisely, created new ones without ‘solving’ anything. I always felt it must be possible to create a workable in-house detention system in big schools, but, since anything resembling that in LAUSD (spent most of my time there) apparently evaporated over time, I concluded that some obscure policy memo had squashed that option.
Oh, that's easy. The last school I worked in (turnaround high school, Massachusetts) had a two-tier approach. First, was leveraging IEPs to get kids out of mainstream classrooms for one or two periods a day. And when the law says they must be in the gen-ed classroom, they leverage the Least Restrictive Environment framework and "pull-out groups" to do the same. For the kids who still cause problems, districts have "alternative schools." These tend to operate more like prisons than schools (I should know, I was sentenced to one before I dropped out), but mostly serve to keep the main building free of difficult students. Of course, there are other ways, too. Tracking is a bit of a taboo these days, but I taught English which always had some form of separation after sophomore year: regular, honors, AP. I usually simultaneously taught regular English and AP, and that regular class was were all the IEPs, 504s, and behavior plans were warehoused. Usually they would lump them all into one section to save on co-teacher costs. These sections were galaxies apart from the rest, and would usually only move through about half the content compared to the others. This is the real trick: every single school I worked at intentionally lumped all of the problematic kids into specific sections which would then, by sheer necessity, operate differently than the rest. But who is really going to complain? In the trenches, when a kid got sent to the alternative school, I sighed with relief. Kids won't say anything either, because those IEP-heavy classes are simply easier. Sounds shitty, but it's the reality.
That squares with much of my experience too. Consistent, full-fledged supervision of kids removed from class isn’t an expense anyone wants to fund. Continuation school is a default solution for the misfit cohort but unavailable as a short term expedient, which is as it should be. The hell of it is that band-aids and non-solutions seem to gain traction simply through bureaucratic inertia, and teachers and sufficiently domesticated kids pay the price.
Remember, charters on average do *worse* than publics. The ones that outperform are usually referred to as "no excuses" charters, meaning they have strict discipline, high standards, high demand to get in, and high attrition.
Many of the rest of the charters are desperate for anyone they can get.
There are so many different kinds of charter schools it's hard to discuss them in a general sense. The city I live near has tried two different charter schools devoted to the arts. Both failed because of poor administration, and an absolute inability to teach basic things like Math and English. Another one devoted to academic excellence has been chugging along for at least a decade. The plain fact of the matter is that disruptive students have a lot of gravity, and take more than their fair share of teachers time relative to the less rowdy students, whether it's in a public school or private one. I can't blame any parent for trying to keep their kids as far away as the disruptive ones as possible. My kids both went to a public school in the Philly metro area. It was about as racially and culturally mixed as a school could possibly be. Every year I'd hear about which teacher drew a bad card, had more disruptive students than average, and how that classroom was the worst one to be in. It's fine to be idealistic in a "no child left behind" sense, but it's also ok to try and keep your own kids out of that particularly bad classroom.
I don’t get how AP classes are similar to selective admissions at the school level. There’s no abandonment of the idea of teaching certain kids, it’s just tracking the curriculum for kids who are willing and able to learn faster within the same school. No spurious claims that the teachers are better. You still have universal free education. Maybe I’m missing something?
My kids go to a very diverse high school in terms of socioeconomics and race / ethnicity. It's a big high school with many AP courses (and "Early College" courses, which are similar). One can pack your schedule with these courses and it's basically like you are attending a different school all day with a smaller group of motivated students, mostly from wealthier backgrounds. I feel kind of bad about it, but the stories my kids tell from the courses they take that are not with this self-selected bubble of students are not great (lots of distractions in the classroom, low standards, unmotivated teachers).
There is also a case to be made that the AP classes are taught by better teachers. It's at least anecdotally true for my kids. You need extra training and motivation to get certified to teach AP courses and they are generally seen as a privilege to teach. Teachers want to avoid the "bad" kids just as much as parents may want to.
Not really. Generally speaking, the best teachers are the ones who can teach classes with a wide range of abilities and get everyone learning and those teachers are not wasted on AP.
I am responding to the notion of filtering strategies (private school the simplest) so your kid is only around the best behaved and highest achieving students. Many creative approaches occurred in the south with the demise of segregation. One I see in diverse communities are spanish or french or mandarin immersion public schools. Seemingly open to all applicants. You know who applies? Only higher income white or asian families.
This is the obvious question that no left of center person in this debate ever wants to ask but it's probably the only one that matters. All the charts and numbers on performance can be spun to whatever end people want them to be, for good or bad. No one ever wants to send their children somewhere rampant with disciplinary problems or an otherwise chaotic environment and anyone who can opt out of it always will.
To your point about how you can't MAKE the kids want to learn - this is exactly right, and it is interesting how we have seen agency taken away from children and placed upon us as teachers.
We are told constantly that we need to BUILD RELATIONSHIPS (it's a holy mantra at this point), because "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." An statement which is taken as axiomatic even though I guarantee you that most teachers in human history did not form 'significant relationships' with their pupils.
For a good 5-6 years we were told that our implicit bias and covert white supremacy was holding our black students back.
A decade before that it was because we were lazy and kids in Waiting for Superman were just sitting there, begging to learn but unionized teachers didn't care.
And so on and so forth. But it's very rarely placed on the students or their parents.
It is darkly interesting to note the difference in how much parents believe they can make their kids want to learn between one of my kids’ mostly immigrant Catholic school and the other’s big city lottery charter.
A worrying number of reformers seem to believe that children do not have free will. They're just objects to be acted upon, like NPCs in a video game who will perform the correct action once you reach the correct point in their dialogue tree.
I'm not talking specifically about the left here. The right often seems outright worse about the agency of children, especially when spanking comes up. Some people seem to think that beatings are a form of mind control. Said people also tend to forget that the passage of time eventually reverses most parent-child power dynamics.
That said, as someone who's on the left, I can tell you that the beliefs you list are usually not as they appear to you. So maybe I'm just missing the nuances of right-wing child-rearing thought, the same way you miss the nuances of left-wing thought on (for example) victim-blaming in sexual assault cases. Sometimes it's tricky to understand this stuff from the outside.
You can see this all over the reform movement and in discussions about choice generally--including this discussion. It's all about what the parents want.
James, how much of the push of responsibility onto teachers is a result of a trend to treat kids and their parents like they are customers of a business? “I’m bringing my kid to school so YOU can teach them! I pay a lot of property taxes to this school!
I hear that other teachers have this problem but in my district, I don't see it much. I'm in a pretty rural area where the parents are not very entitled. Most of the push I describe is from the educational apparatus, from ed schools to professional development
Parents should be able to choose their kids’ school, period. It is not for them nor their kids to bear the burden of the incorrigible. It’s not ok for the well to do to (including the progressive politicians) to have this choice but not the poor. Those who would rob this choice from poor parents while preaching equality and opportunity are charlatans.
But you see, that's not possible - because what all the parents want is for their kid to go to school with the highest performers. But there are only so many of those. You can't have total choice and meaningful differences between schools because you end up with an all-lottery system anyway. What people want is choice FOR THEIR KID, not for other kids.
It is possible for parents to have a choice. If your point is, eventually there are diminishingly few good choices, that does not and should not contradict their right to choose. On the other hand, invested parents who can vote with their kids' feet would have a much stronger voice in how the schools they choose are run than they have now, which is essentially none. I would argue that these parental advocates would in the end improve the average quality of education over the abysmal and worsening trend.
I'm saying that if all parents have equal ability to choose what school their kids go to, everyone is going to chase the schools with the "good" kids, including the parents of the "bad" kids, and the math doesn't math.
I understand your point. My point is, no matter how futile you might think it to be, having a choice itself is crucial and should be a right. Just as many experienced the last presidential election to be a futile choice, no one would want to be deprived of their right to vote.
All parents have choices. You aren't insisting on choice. You are insisting that the taxpayers fund their choices. And no, taxpayers should not be expected to fund private school, be it charter, magnet, or actual private, just because parents lack the means for the choice they want.
Frankly I think the solution is that at some point you need to be willing to expel students who refuse to learn, segregate them into another classroom or track, or just let them leave. This would be much more achievable in high school if we had high enough standards in K-8 that people who graduated middle school were at least capable of basic work; I really don't think it makes sense to try and force anyone who doesn't want to to get anything beyond a basic education, and I especially don't think it makes sense to do so at everyone else's expense. We need to make everyone learn to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and understand and apply basic facts about the world insofar as we are able, since these are the basic tools one needs to engage in further learning independently; beyond that, I think it is a matter of personal interest/desire/responsibility.
The problem is there aren't jobs for high school dropouts anymore. We're not digging ditches with an army of low functioning people with shovels. When we dig ditches at all, it's with a million dollar piece of highly sophisticated machine that takes a high amount of aptitude and training to operate.
We need to figure out some path for dropouts (which is an archaic term, but still apt) that lets them make some contribution in exchange for some compensation that puts them in reasonable living accommodations and puts food on the table.
Failure to do this just multiplies tent cities filled with fentanyl-addled zombies.
Do you have some ideas you like for what to do about disruptive behavior in the classroom? I agree that segregation, abandoning universal education, etc. are bad approaches.
My daughter applied to public middle schools (magnet schools) this year. The composition & selectivity of the student body are usually presented as the first bits of information about the program, before you get to any information about the program curriculum, teacher characteristics, etc. E.g., this is the first paragraph of the website for one program: "XXX is an advanced academic program with limited enrollment. Our program, consisting of over five hundred magnet students from all around the Austin area, is part of a 140 year old tradition. Authorized by the Austin Independent School District's school board in 2001, XXX Magnet program is the only program of its kind in the nation! Enrollment includes over 50% identified Gifted and Talented students." Just one point of anecdata in support of your thesis: Selection is advertised to parents as a feature, not a bug.
You didn’t explicitly say that there is no such thing as better and worse teaching methods, curriculum design, etc. But one could come away from reading this believing that student selection is doing 100% of the work. (My guess is you’ll say it’s doing 80%-110% of the work depending on the school, with a median of 95%.) Let’s say we had no charter schools or private schools and everyone went to the regular public schools. (Now I’m doing speculative fiction, bear with me.) Have you seen some ways of developing and propagating better teaching methods that would work well in that world? (I just find that subject interesting to think about, I’m not saying it’s contrary to your essay in any way.)
"Selective" does not mean the same thing as "elite".
When I realized my youngest son was not going to thrive in a traditional public high school environment, I rolled up my sleeves & helped organize a charter high school where I hoped he would thrive—and he did! This charter school was based on experiential learning as opposed to more traditional schools that force kids to sit in classrooms for six hours a day, and my preference for it had nothing to do with keeping my kid away from disruptors. As a matter of fact, my kid was classified as one of the disruptors because he hated being a passive recipient of canned ideas for so long a period of time every day.
On a somewhat unrelated tangent—a friend of mine who's a high school chemistry teacher laughed when I congratulated her for teaching in a college prep school. "The reason we're a college prep school has nothing to do with providing a better learning environment for pupils," she told me. "It has to do with the fact that providing so-called vocational courses is more expensive than college prep. Plus, college prep trains them to sit in office cubicles."
Of course, so-called vocational courses are not the only type of experiential learning. But it's definitely one type of experiential learning.
I dunno, I think the “kick the nonverbal kid who assaults the teacher out of my kids’ class and put him somewhere he can be helped” omelette is worth the “but what if these kids from single parent homes can pass English at grade level no matter how unlikely just as a matter of probabilities” broken eggs.
The non-verbal kid assaulting the teacher is protected by special ed law, and is an entirely different issue with literally nothing in common with the kids from single parent broken homes.
I agree with all the core points Freddie makes here, but I think he's avoided the next logical step in the analysis: what should be done about students that don't want to engage in education? If these charter parents are right that these students are disruptive and hold everyone else back, aren't they being perfectly reasonable in finding a way to get away from them? What should public schools do to counteract this tendency?
Wife is a teacher and what they're doing right now is just lowering the standards and moving them around internally. If the kid is 100% disruptive but you move them between 3 teachers over the year, hey that's only 33% disruptive to any particular class, you're way ahead! And they still "passed" and are on track to keep you graduation rates up because your standards are so low!
I think this is most likely correct in its diagnosis but shies away from what the obvious solution is to save public schools from the pincer of conservative school choice and progressive 'standards don't really matter' schools of thought: enforce reasonable standards of discipline and create a means of removing problem students to separate areas (which could probably still be on site) able to assist them or worst case scenario babysit them while their parents work.
Seriously, if you care about public education and want it to maintain the minimum threshold of public support you have to give people confidence that it's being run to something approaching median standards of discipline and decorum, maybe better if you want the core middle to upper middle class who make these institutions function staying invested. Anyone squeamish about that for reasons of race and class isn't being serious.
The kinds of people who are passionate about public education tend to be people who are very, very susceptible to accusations of racism, which is part of why disciplinary "reform" was so sudden and comprehensive in many places.
I can certainly see that. I nevertheless find it frustrating and based on a well-meaning but still racist set of premises. Black parents want an orderly place for their children and black students should be given the same opportunity to learn in an environment that isn't ruined by a small incorrigible subset of the student body.
It was my experience (one kid in high-performing suburban public schools, two in a highly academic Catholic school) that no one school can provide a complete package of education, given that all kids have different strengths, weaknesses, and interests. The Catholic school excelled at reading, math and humanities--the students got a lot more history and of course religion content. Science was taught, but there were no facilities so once they got into middle school it wasn't as good as the science classes offered at the public middle school. Music was a weakness as well. The school worked really hard to keep tuition as affordable as possible so subjects that required labs or specialty equipment like musical instruments and a dedicated teacher with expertise in that subject had to take second place to the basic "meat and potatoes" K-8 education. The public school was able to offer better music and science, but the math and reading curricula in the early grades was more gimmicky and not as effective--if your kid needed to learn a lot of phonics to unlock the ability to read, it had to be done at home since the school didn't go as deep as some kids needed.
That was just on the school side--on the kid side, we had one who could read but didn't like to, and a reasonably bright kid can do enough to get by without really working very hard at things they dislike. One struggled to organize their writing into coherent paragraphs, and luckily because they were in the Catholic school that spent a LOT of time and focus on teaching their students how to do longer form writing (long papers in middle school) the teacher noticed and worked with them. In public school that level of complexity wasn't expected before high school and so the problem would not have been caught and addressed.
It really depends on the public school. One argument for sending kids to public school (especially high school) is that life will not filter out stupid people, bad people, or disruptive people. Being in a classroom with all walks of humanity allows kids to learn a certain amount of resilience. I do have serious problems with the heavy reliance on screens--but there is probably less harm done in secondary education, especially if a kid has had a pretty traditional elementary education where there aren't many screens.
In our case, the benefits of a big suburban public high school were far greater than the costs, and it allowed us to save a lot of money for college. We had two in a good/above average district and after the K-8 Catholic prep, they did great. The other kid was in a school that had an unusually high percentage of kids whose parents were Asian immigrants here working in tech/engineering. The school was a bit of a pressure cooker, but there was almost no disorder of the kind that you hear so much about today--the parents would never have tolerated it. Our kid worked her ass off to keep up and only really started enjoying the social and club aspects of high school after their junior year. The academics and focus on grades were pretty brutal.
"...no one school can provide a complete package of education."
So true. I went to an outstanding Jesuit high school that was very well rounded in its curriculum. Aside from the obvious moral tenets, it taught great Literature, History, Music, Chemistry, Math, Foreign Language, Debate, etc...even Theater. For instance, I haven't touched chemistry at all since then but still know how to read the periodic table.
What it _didn't_ do well at all really was basic life skills like personal finance, nutrition, or any practical trade skills. The nutrition part I eventually learned on my own, but the financial aspect I could have really used back then. And I ended up getting my bachelors degree in a mostly trade skill industry. Ironically, I remember in college some friends talking about HS shop class and I had to ask them what the hell they were talking about.
My take is that most of the students at my high school not only had wealthy parents (so they didn't need to worry much about money, or their parents taught them that), but most students were expected to go on to non trade-skill prestige careers (which also are mostly high-income).
Perhaps its also harder for students of lower-income parents to get the skills they may need from a private school because those schools tend to assume a lot about both the background and potential of the students attending.
There used to be a very good website by the National Counsel of Mathematics Teachers. Lots of good stuff. I had a program that I really liked called Connected Math. There are a lot of good basics, that aren't all computation. I wanted my kids to learn how to use math for problem solving, not computation.
I'm not impressed with a third grader doing long-division. Most kids that age don't have the ability to do abstract reasoning and in order to really understand what they're doing need concrete things. Long division is an abstract, place value exercise. In my son's calculus class they discussed how non of them remembered how to do long division.
I work at a Mathnasium, and one of the big things I learned as I taught is that fractions and long division are both much harder than the curriculum thinks they are.
There's a sort of baseline assumption that fractions are pretty basic and kids should learn them, but they're objectively more complicated than a lot of stuff we reserve for later grades. So they just don't stick. They have to be retaught again and again.
This comic comes to mind more often than it should: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-12-06
Not because we explain fractions in such a complex way, but because fractions really are complex under the hood, and we don't really give that complexity the respect it deserves.
Not that I can recall, sorry.
Fractions, ratios, percentages, and proportions are all pretty much the same thing and all brutally difficult. Ideally, we'd cover them constantly in seventh and eighth grade. Plenty of complexity for the accelerationist obsessed parents but no, they want their kid not knowing this but in geometry.
The basics of those can be introduced in the younger grades using concrete examples. Fraction circles, apples etc. To really understand and manipulate those concepts a person has to have the ability for abstract reasoning. I remember one teacher who had taught at a lot of grades saying that nothing she did with the fourth graders in fractions etc. stuck no matter how much she worked at it, but in fifth grade they'd get it in a matter of weeks.
I read something recently that there is a big shift in the brain at about 9 years old.
Not all that smart, if they can't do math. And not all that well-behaved, if they avoid math because they don't like it.
And the upshot is that the "bad" kids get warehoused in the bad schools.
Needless to say, this is entirely intentional.
I mean, what else is there to do? It's the same with homelessness, crime, mental illness, all these other subjects of this blog, the disorder that triggers the American selfishness gene is overwhelmingly created by a very small slice of the population, but these are hard problems to deal with that inevitably trade off effectiveness with our notions of fairness and justice.
Inherent in this seems to be the idea that some kids are just "bad" or are going to chronically act out, not much to be done.
I admit that I don't have any easy answers.
Nope. Selfish members of powerful groups hoard the resources that anyone needs for an orderly life. There are at least two solutions to all of the problems you mentioned:
1) tax the rich
and 2) prosecute workers in the healthcare, law enforcement, and education industries who have been credibly accused of abusing the people they’re supposed to serve.
You don't have to read very many of Freddie's blog posts to realize that firehosing money at most problems seldom produces solutions. Income inequality I think is a problem that likely has means of improvement that involve the taxation, but its far trickier than the simplistic slogan of tax the rich.
Bullshit, Bernard. The cages you want for all the inconvenient people aren’t cheap. They cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, per inmate. For a fraction of that money, you could solve virtually all of their problems. You could buy them a house and a car. You could pay for their education. You could set up a retirement fund for them. You could hire domestic help for them. You could ensure that they always had top-tier health insurance.
Vulnerable people aren’t problems. The systems and people that hurt them are problems.
When you use the umbrella term "vulnerable" you strip the agency from everyone you cram under that umbrella and most of the bad school behaviors we're talking about involve agency on the part of those people acting them out.
A significant portion of the disruptive kids I was exposed to in my urban public school experience lived in houses and had cars -- is your argument they just need bigger, more sumptuous homes and better cars?
Once aspect of vulnerability is the inherent limitation on personal agency. If your parents can house you and drive you to school, but they aren’t powerful enough to say “No!” to weekend homework assignments, you are vulnerable. You aren’t allowed to meet your needs for rest and quality time with your family. And, for a young person, that deprivation hits hard. Public schools should not be exploiting families of modest means.
Take a look at this place
https://www.tompkinsweekly.com/news/asteri-ithaca-evacuation-leaves-residents-scrambling-for-housing-answers-amid-safety-concerns-d501317d
We spent $90M to build a housing development that would get homeless people out of the streets. Most of the people who live their are poor and just need a safe place to live. A few of the people there want to break out all the windows in the stairwell and will probably want to do that no matter how much we spend on them. Those people should be in jail or a mental institution and then the problem of housing the other 95% becomes tractable.
The people who are the most hurt by this situation are not people like me who have to look at burned out and boarded up apartments as we drive by and sometimes have the bus delayed because police and fire are responding to Asteri again. The people who are hurt the most are the vulnerable people who live there... And they really are facing problems like: many unhoused people won't be housed if they can't live with their dog but if they can live with their pitbull it will bite other vulnerable people, not only the other people who live there, but people like my schizophrenic friend.
That’s why cities should be prohibited from letting people rot on the curb for years. The average “bad tenant” has lived unhoused/insecurely housed for over a decade before they land in someplace like Asteri. Their habits for surviving the street won’t disappear the second they’re housed. They won’t disappear in a day, a month, or a year. If a long re-assimilation process is too onerous for you to deal with, you need to support policies that will permanently house people very, very quickly.
This is true. It's one of the main appeals of private schools.
North Carolina has been trying to destroy its public school system for some time and it appears, in many cases, to be working for many of the reasons you point out here.
Not only are 10% of our students in charter schools, countless others are now in private schools due to our generous voucher program. And the public schools, who take anyone who shows up, are routinely and roundly criticized by our state legislature for failing their students. We have set up a system in which our public schools are designed to struggle. It also doesn't help that we pay our teachers poorly.
This of course hastens the flight of students whose families have the time and resources to chase the best education for their kids.
It's a pernicious cycle and one I think will be unlikely to be reversed.
And indeed, in my experience, there's a profound ambivalence among a lot of private school people about the idea of universal student vouchers - of course the schools would like access to government money, but they understand that their ability to filter out the “bad kids” is core to their sales pitch and also a key reason their teachers will work for less money.
Yes. The school my youngest two went to for high school doesn't accept vouchers for just that reason.
There is also a lot of parsing that goes on in my world--the Triangle. Almost every Democratic voter and many Independents want to support the public schools. AND, when it's their child/ren, they go to charter or private schools. The attitude is: we'll pay our taxes, even those with surcharges for the public schools, but we won't use them if they're not the best option for our kid/s.
You could call it "Triangulating". One of those many occasions when our liberals find living up to their principles too costly.
I think it’s moved past that. Many liberals feel that if you vote for bonds, pay your taxes, advocate for the schools, that’s enough. It’s even more complicated for those parents who feel, somewhat justifiably, that their kids, who don’t need extra care in the public schools, are getting lost in the shuffle. Add on to that extremely liberal or conservative school districts that have enacted policies parents fundamentally disagree with. I’m not sure those parents aren’t living up to their principles as much as they are responding to a complicated reality.
To be fair, I briefly went to one of the best public high schools in the state (ECHHS), and there were regularly fights of dozens of students in the hallways. As in, dozens of students at a time all beating on each other that teachers and staff had to break up. Not sure if that's still a problem because I didn't go for very long (dropped out), but it was when I was there.
I am not particularly surprised that my parents, and most others who had the resources to do so, chose private school. And yes, of course this is a structural issue, but it will always be a problem no matter how otherwise just the system is if you have universal mandatory K-12 and no ability to impose meaningful discipline or God forbid, suspend or expel students.
I hear you. My first two kids are East grads and I was the head of the SGC there for several years. I sent my second two to DA.
That is not surprising, which I think is the problem.
I went to CHHS (during the Obama years - I wonder if we overlapped!) and recall similar incidents. I was very insulated in my Honors/AP/performing arts bubble but you all walk the same halls.
I was East, and went only very briefly during the Trump administration. I think it's a general problem, though.
I'm one of those parents. I wanted to support the public middle and high school where my kids did sports, through an independent home study program, which I did in California. They did eventually set up a program but it was one of those awful computer based ones.
I homeschooled my last four kids in the upper grades because the popular culture is toxic. Two of my kids were severely socially damaged because of that culture.
My kids went to community college at 15 and did a lot of extra-curricular stuff. I was also able to give them a better education. They read a lot of books and wrote a lot of essays. I'm a teacher.
That's rational? Pay for a public school system so someone else can deal with the kids that you don't want in your children's school.
No defender of charter schools, but I’ve worked at two of them (Boston and Providence) and, man, how often I wished they did a better job filtering students, like they are accused of doing. The ugly truth is those “bad kids” you described do exist, and they are almost always the rationale families give for sending their kids to charters. But the schools I worked at would never dream of expelling somebody except in extreme circumstances. No matter how much we all wanted it. The other thing charter schools tend to be good at is pumping effort into college admissions. I worked at a school that had 100% college acceptance most years. But it’s bullshit because most kids drop out first semester.
You ever dig into the Success Academy stuff? They certainly went very far. Click that EducationRealist link. The OCR suit was really shocking. (And then it just disappeared.)
Yeah. Charter schools are, on the whole, a bad thing for education, or at least neutral. But I did realize, once I left charters and went to a public high school in receivership (MA), that traditional public schools are hardly exempt from all manner of what I would consider rights violations. They have way less leeway with parent selection, but because they are under less overall surveillance they do all manner of shady business with warehousing bad students internally.
I've seen similar in private schools, when the bad kid was the scion of a well-heeled donor that the school could not afford (literally) to piss off.
Curious about what you’ve seen re ‘warehousing internally’. In the schools I worked in there was never any durably consistent approach. ‘Detention’ morphed into ‘suspension’ by the early 2000s and that evolved further when the Obama DOE admonished schools about high suspension rates on civil rights grounds. I taught for a long time and spent 4 years in a profoundly stressed inner city MS. I was there when the word on suspension came down from above. The pendulum swung the other way immediately. The dean told me in 2011 that the prin had told her not to suspend any student for fighting until their 3rd offense. Obviously that created as many problems as it solved - or more precisely, created new ones without ‘solving’ anything. I always felt it must be possible to create a workable in-house detention system in big schools, but, since anything resembling that in LAUSD (spent most of my time there) apparently evaporated over time, I concluded that some obscure policy memo had squashed that option.
Oh, that's easy. The last school I worked in (turnaround high school, Massachusetts) had a two-tier approach. First, was leveraging IEPs to get kids out of mainstream classrooms for one or two periods a day. And when the law says they must be in the gen-ed classroom, they leverage the Least Restrictive Environment framework and "pull-out groups" to do the same. For the kids who still cause problems, districts have "alternative schools." These tend to operate more like prisons than schools (I should know, I was sentenced to one before I dropped out), but mostly serve to keep the main building free of difficult students. Of course, there are other ways, too. Tracking is a bit of a taboo these days, but I taught English which always had some form of separation after sophomore year: regular, honors, AP. I usually simultaneously taught regular English and AP, and that regular class was were all the IEPs, 504s, and behavior plans were warehoused. Usually they would lump them all into one section to save on co-teacher costs. These sections were galaxies apart from the rest, and would usually only move through about half the content compared to the others. This is the real trick: every single school I worked at intentionally lumped all of the problematic kids into specific sections which would then, by sheer necessity, operate differently than the rest. But who is really going to complain? In the trenches, when a kid got sent to the alternative school, I sighed with relief. Kids won't say anything either, because those IEP-heavy classes are simply easier. Sounds shitty, but it's the reality.
That squares with much of my experience too. Consistent, full-fledged supervision of kids removed from class isn’t an expense anyone wants to fund. Continuation school is a default solution for the misfit cohort but unavailable as a short term expedient, which is as it should be. The hell of it is that band-aids and non-solutions seem to gain traction simply through bureaucratic inertia, and teachers and sufficiently domesticated kids pay the price.
Remember, charters on average do *worse* than publics. The ones that outperform are usually referred to as "no excuses" charters, meaning they have strict discipline, high standards, high demand to get in, and high attrition.
Many of the rest of the charters are desperate for anyone they can get.
Yeah, all the ones I’ve worked at “outperformed” the local alternatives, at least in terms of college acceptance, and leaned “no excuses.”
There are so many different kinds of charter schools it's hard to discuss them in a general sense. The city I live near has tried two different charter schools devoted to the arts. Both failed because of poor administration, and an absolute inability to teach basic things like Math and English. Another one devoted to academic excellence has been chugging along for at least a decade. The plain fact of the matter is that disruptive students have a lot of gravity, and take more than their fair share of teachers time relative to the less rowdy students, whether it's in a public school or private one. I can't blame any parent for trying to keep their kids as far away as the disruptive ones as possible. My kids both went to a public school in the Philly metro area. It was about as racially and culturally mixed as a school could possibly be. Every year I'd hear about which teacher drew a bad card, had more disruptive students than average, and how that classroom was the worst one to be in. It's fine to be idealistic in a "no child left behind" sense, but it's also ok to try and keep your own kids out of that particularly bad classroom.
Spot on. Exam schools in big cities are an example. Arguably AP classes do the same.
I don’t get how AP classes are similar to selective admissions at the school level. There’s no abandonment of the idea of teaching certain kids, it’s just tracking the curriculum for kids who are willing and able to learn faster within the same school. No spurious claims that the teachers are better. You still have universal free education. Maybe I’m missing something?
My kids go to a very diverse high school in terms of socioeconomics and race / ethnicity. It's a big high school with many AP courses (and "Early College" courses, which are similar). One can pack your schedule with these courses and it's basically like you are attending a different school all day with a smaller group of motivated students, mostly from wealthier backgrounds. I feel kind of bad about it, but the stories my kids tell from the courses they take that are not with this self-selected bubble of students are not great (lots of distractions in the classroom, low standards, unmotivated teachers).
There is also a case to be made that the AP classes are taught by better teachers. It's at least anecdotally true for my kids. You need extra training and motivation to get certified to teach AP courses and they are generally seen as a privilege to teach. Teachers want to avoid the "bad" kids just as much as parents may want to.
Not really. Generally speaking, the best teachers are the ones who can teach classes with a wide range of abilities and get everyone learning and those teachers are not wasted on AP.
I am responding to the notion of filtering strategies (private school the simplest) so your kid is only around the best behaved and highest achieving students. Many creative approaches occurred in the south with the demise of segregation. One I see in diverse communities are spanish or french or mandarin immersion public schools. Seemingly open to all applicants. You know who applies? Only higher income white or asian families.
Why would anyone want their kids around bad kids though? There’s no incentive at all.
This is the obvious question that no left of center person in this debate ever wants to ask but it's probably the only one that matters. All the charts and numbers on performance can be spun to whatever end people want them to be, for good or bad. No one ever wants to send their children somewhere rampant with disciplinary problems or an otherwise chaotic environment and anyone who can opt out of it always will.
I wonder how much of this is downstream of disciplinary reform that allegedly has made it harder to enforce behavioral norms in public schools.
To your point about how you can't MAKE the kids want to learn - this is exactly right, and it is interesting how we have seen agency taken away from children and placed upon us as teachers.
We are told constantly that we need to BUILD RELATIONSHIPS (it's a holy mantra at this point), because "No significant learning can occur without a significant relationship." An statement which is taken as axiomatic even though I guarantee you that most teachers in human history did not form 'significant relationships' with their pupils.
For a good 5-6 years we were told that our implicit bias and covert white supremacy was holding our black students back.
A decade before that it was because we were lazy and kids in Waiting for Superman were just sitting there, begging to learn but unionized teachers didn't care.
And so on and so forth. But it's very rarely placed on the students or their parents.
It is darkly interesting to note the difference in how much parents believe they can make their kids want to learn between one of my kids’ mostly immigrant Catholic school and the other’s big city lottery charter.
A worrying number of reformers seem to believe that children do not have free will. They're just objects to be acted upon, like NPCs in a video game who will perform the correct action once you reach the correct point in their dialogue tree.
I don't know if you've noticed but a huge plank of left wing thought is that the underprivileged do not have agency.
-Palestinians do not bear any responsibility for their history of terrible decisions
-Children are mere NPCs, as you say, in the hands of their teachers
-Women have no agency in regards to date-rape and risk
-Black people who commit crimes are just products of society.
-Etc.
The desire to not 'blame the victim' has led to a ideological aversion to assigning responsibility to anyone we deem a not-power-haver
I'm not talking specifically about the left here. The right often seems outright worse about the agency of children, especially when spanking comes up. Some people seem to think that beatings are a form of mind control. Said people also tend to forget that the passage of time eventually reverses most parent-child power dynamics.
That said, as someone who's on the left, I can tell you that the beliefs you list are usually not as they appear to you. So maybe I'm just missing the nuances of right-wing child-rearing thought, the same way you miss the nuances of left-wing thought on (for example) victim-blaming in sexual assault cases. Sometimes it's tricky to understand this stuff from the outside.
I don't really think I'm missing any nuance. My experience with the right is that they OVER focus on individual agency.
-Want an abortion? Shouldnt have had pre-marital sex
-Want welfare? Get a job.
-Etc.
To be reductive, the Right says - hey minorities and poor people IT'S YOUR FAULT and the Left says NO IT'S NOT
Your comments are straightforward and honest, but you are not wrong. Very succinct, which I appreciate.
A worrying number of people in society believe this, including teachers and parents. Blank slate theory is stupid and it's winning.
You can see this all over the reform movement and in discussions about choice generally--including this discussion. It's all about what the parents want.
James, how much of the push of responsibility onto teachers is a result of a trend to treat kids and their parents like they are customers of a business? “I’m bringing my kid to school so YOU can teach them! I pay a lot of property taxes to this school!
I hear that other teachers have this problem but in my district, I don't see it much. I'm in a pretty rural area where the parents are not very entitled. Most of the push I describe is from the educational apparatus, from ed schools to professional development
Parents should be able to choose their kids’ school, period. It is not for them nor their kids to bear the burden of the incorrigible. It’s not ok for the well to do to (including the progressive politicians) to have this choice but not the poor. Those who would rob this choice from poor parents while preaching equality and opportunity are charlatans.
But you see, that's not possible - because what all the parents want is for their kid to go to school with the highest performers. But there are only so many of those. You can't have total choice and meaningful differences between schools because you end up with an all-lottery system anyway. What people want is choice FOR THEIR KID, not for other kids.
It is possible for parents to have a choice. If your point is, eventually there are diminishingly few good choices, that does not and should not contradict their right to choose. On the other hand, invested parents who can vote with their kids' feet would have a much stronger voice in how the schools they choose are run than they have now, which is essentially none. I would argue that these parental advocates would in the end improve the average quality of education over the abysmal and worsening trend.
I'm saying that if all parents have equal ability to choose what school their kids go to, everyone is going to chase the schools with the "good" kids, including the parents of the "bad" kids, and the math doesn't math.
I understand your point. My point is, no matter how futile you might think it to be, having a choice itself is crucial and should be a right. Just as many experienced the last presidential election to be a futile choice, no one would want to be deprived of their right to vote.
All parents have choices. You aren't insisting on choice. You are insisting that the taxpayers fund their choices. And no, taxpayers should not be expected to fund private school, be it charter, magnet, or actual private, just because parents lack the means for the choice they want.
You are right, I stand corrected: let them eat cake.
Frankly I think the solution is that at some point you need to be willing to expel students who refuse to learn, segregate them into another classroom or track, or just let them leave. This would be much more achievable in high school if we had high enough standards in K-8 that people who graduated middle school were at least capable of basic work; I really don't think it makes sense to try and force anyone who doesn't want to to get anything beyond a basic education, and I especially don't think it makes sense to do so at everyone else's expense. We need to make everyone learn to read, write, do basic arithmetic, and understand and apply basic facts about the world insofar as we are able, since these are the basic tools one needs to engage in further learning independently; beyond that, I think it is a matter of personal interest/desire/responsibility.
The problem is there aren't jobs for high school dropouts anymore. We're not digging ditches with an army of low functioning people with shovels. When we dig ditches at all, it's with a million dollar piece of highly sophisticated machine that takes a high amount of aptitude and training to operate.
We need to figure out some path for dropouts (which is an archaic term, but still apt) that lets them make some contribution in exchange for some compensation that puts them in reasonable living accommodations and puts food on the table.
Failure to do this just multiplies tent cities filled with fentanyl-addled zombies.
Do you have some ideas you like for what to do about disruptive behavior in the classroom? I agree that segregation, abandoning universal education, etc. are bad approaches.
My daughter applied to public middle schools (magnet schools) this year. The composition & selectivity of the student body are usually presented as the first bits of information about the program, before you get to any information about the program curriculum, teacher characteristics, etc. E.g., this is the first paragraph of the website for one program: "XXX is an advanced academic program with limited enrollment. Our program, consisting of over five hundred magnet students from all around the Austin area, is part of a 140 year old tradition. Authorized by the Austin Independent School District's school board in 2001, XXX Magnet program is the only program of its kind in the nation! Enrollment includes over 50% identified Gifted and Talented students." Just one point of anecdata in support of your thesis: Selection is advertised to parents as a feature, not a bug.
"XXX Magnet program is the only program of its kind in the nation!"
No propaganda, that. Any other XXX programs shut down after receiving no enrollments.
You didn’t explicitly say that there is no such thing as better and worse teaching methods, curriculum design, etc. But one could come away from reading this believing that student selection is doing 100% of the work. (My guess is you’ll say it’s doing 80%-110% of the work depending on the school, with a median of 95%.) Let’s say we had no charter schools or private schools and everyone went to the regular public schools. (Now I’m doing speculative fiction, bear with me.) Have you seen some ways of developing and propagating better teaching methods that would work well in that world? (I just find that subject interesting to think about, I’m not saying it’s contrary to your essay in any way.)
"Selective" does not mean the same thing as "elite".
When I realized my youngest son was not going to thrive in a traditional public high school environment, I rolled up my sleeves & helped organize a charter high school where I hoped he would thrive—and he did! This charter school was based on experiential learning as opposed to more traditional schools that force kids to sit in classrooms for six hours a day, and my preference for it had nothing to do with keeping my kid away from disruptors. As a matter of fact, my kid was classified as one of the disruptors because he hated being a passive recipient of canned ideas for so long a period of time every day.
On a somewhat unrelated tangent—a friend of mine who's a high school chemistry teacher laughed when I congratulated her for teaching in a college prep school. "The reason we're a college prep school has nothing to do with providing a better learning environment for pupils," she told me. "It has to do with the fact that providing so-called vocational courses is more expensive than college prep. Plus, college prep trains them to sit in office cubicles."
Of course, so-called vocational courses are not the only type of experiential learning. But it's definitely one type of experiential learning.
I dunno, I think the “kick the nonverbal kid who assaults the teacher out of my kids’ class and put him somewhere he can be helped” omelette is worth the “but what if these kids from single parent homes can pass English at grade level no matter how unlikely just as a matter of probabilities” broken eggs.
The non-verbal kid assaulting the teacher is protected by special ed law, and is an entirely different issue with literally nothing in common with the kids from single parent broken homes.
I agree with all the core points Freddie makes here, but I think he's avoided the next logical step in the analysis: what should be done about students that don't want to engage in education? If these charter parents are right that these students are disruptive and hold everyone else back, aren't they being perfectly reasonable in finding a way to get away from them? What should public schools do to counteract this tendency?
Wife is a teacher and what they're doing right now is just lowering the standards and moving them around internally. If the kid is 100% disruptive but you move them between 3 teachers over the year, hey that's only 33% disruptive to any particular class, you're way ahead! And they still "passed" and are on track to keep you graduation rates up because your standards are so low!
It's a horrible mess.
I think this is most likely correct in its diagnosis but shies away from what the obvious solution is to save public schools from the pincer of conservative school choice and progressive 'standards don't really matter' schools of thought: enforce reasonable standards of discipline and create a means of removing problem students to separate areas (which could probably still be on site) able to assist them or worst case scenario babysit them while their parents work.
Seriously, if you care about public education and want it to maintain the minimum threshold of public support you have to give people confidence that it's being run to something approaching median standards of discipline and decorum, maybe better if you want the core middle to upper middle class who make these institutions function staying invested. Anyone squeamish about that for reasons of race and class isn't being serious.
The kinds of people who are passionate about public education tend to be people who are very, very susceptible to accusations of racism, which is part of why disciplinary "reform" was so sudden and comprehensive in many places.
I can certainly see that. I nevertheless find it frustrating and based on a well-meaning but still racist set of premises. Black parents want an orderly place for their children and black students should be given the same opportunity to learn in an environment that isn't ruined by a small incorrigible subset of the student body.
Unless it's their kid that's considered the small incorrigible subset.
Haha my kid years ago.