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Elon Z's avatar

It's not that I don't necessarily disagree, but you're also seeing the highest percentage of children homeschooled, ever (and that's not because they're working from home, these are children who've withdrawn from all public schooling). You have a huge portion of the country that doesn't trust public schools, that's not a good look. It wasn't like this when we were in school 30 years ago.

About 2 years ago, my sister said she planned to homeschool her kids (then 3 & 1) to which I replied that she was crazy and public schools are fine. About 2 months ago, after a year of seeing what's been going on in places like Loudon, Fairfax and local to me (near very Liberal Portland, Oregon), I told her I think homeschooling is the right choice.

There's no longer an emphasis on STEM education, anti-racism curriculum is king and cancel-culture reigns. There's no more open debate. The focus is on race. Teachers are openly displaying communist or antifa symbols. You have to worry if some batshit social worker is gonna convince your kid they're trans (please don't tell me I'm crazy, this literally is happening in some places and parents telling me half the high school claims to be trans).

You can tell these people they don't get to decide how their money is spent, but they're fleeing the schools YOU desperately want to preserve. You were the one who said last month, in a post where you banned comment, schools should be a warm, welcoming place. They're not, or at least getting to that place.

After enough families have fled, the schools you say you cherished as a kid and that every kid should cherish, will be, for lack of a better word, defunded.

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Chesterton's Fence Repair Co.'s avatar

"Many studies that involve randomly assigning students to schools perceived to be of differing quality find no school effects, which is counterintuitive only if you assume every brain is the same. There are no magical institutions anywhere in the world where you can take a kid who is not naturally inclined to be a genius and turn them into a genius."

I don't have access to most of those studies, but I trust your characterization. I would be curious to know whether there's other research pointing in the other direction.

But the second sentence seems like a huge strawman. I don't think the argument is that a different school could turn all children into geniuses. I think the argument is that certain public schools are indeed full of children suffering from "complex and multivariate social problem[s]," which often means that a school is full of violence, disruption, chaos, a poor culture of learning, constant teacher distraction, etc. How is it possible that these conditions don't drag down the other kids in the same school who aren't personally suffering from the same complex and multivariate social problems, but who get the spillover effect?

(See, for example, this paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22042 -- "Results show that exposure to a disruptive peer in classes of 25 during elementary school reduces earnings at age 26 by 3 to 4 percent. We estimate that differential exposure to children linked to domestic violence [their proxy for "disruptive," for reasons they explain in the paper] explains 5 to 6 percent of the rich-poor earnings gap in our data, and that removing one disruptive peer from a classroom for one year would raise the present discounted value of classmates' future earnings by $100,000.")

If nothing else, in high school the condition of the student body often means those schools don't have advanced classes because there isn't sufficient demand for them. I would need very strong evidence to believe that a bright kid who goes to a dangerous high school where advanced calculus, physics, and chemistry are not offered will be on the exactly the same footing heading into college science and math as equivalently bright kids who went to quiet, well-behaved schools where such classes were offered.

And this is to say nothing of the psychological and social effects other than test scores -- why should well-behaved kids, with parents who have the hustle to try for something better, be forced to go to school with kids whose parents don't care, who don't want to be there, who disrupt the learning environment, and who are often actively dangerous? I feel for the latter group of kids, who are the way they are through no fault of their own. But they can be awful to be around -- especially now that many public schools feel hamstrung in applying discipline.

If it truly won't work -- i.e., if well-designed studies truly and consistently show that none of those factors matters, and the kids in terrible schools somehow are graduating at their full individual potential and without psychological scars... then fine. But it seems to me that's the question. Not whether children of middling or low potential will become geniuses in a different school.

And if the answer is that it's morally wrong to abandon the difficult kids, notwithstanding that they ruin learning for the people around them, that's fine, too. But then let's outlaw private education altogether. Rich liberal parents wax poetic about the glorious communal project of public education -- and then they put their kids in Harvard-Westlake and Sidwell Friends. We should also assign all children in a county randomly to schools, so that each school gets its fair share of difficult kids and there are no "good schools" anymore. And no enclaves within larger systems, like Beverly Hills. THEN I would believe people when they say they're committed to solidarity with those kids. Otherwise it often seems to mean that only poor families should stand in solidarity with them.

A final argument might be that it would be cheaper and more efficient to remove the difficult kids from the schools. I think that's politically unpalatable, though.

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