I think this can be misleading in the same way some charter school results are. The easiest way to improve a school's results isn't to improve the education provided, it's to get rid of the worst performing kids.
Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pick the kid up.
The same type of thing is in play in military schools. There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms. All the kids will be well fed and groomed and socialized. Is the education better, or have they just selected better performing kids? The article touches on this. But I don't think takes it nearly seriously enough.
Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain.
My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're only accepting kids with two parents, in fact they're doing a much better job of helping poor families in my district than the public school system, which forces all the poor students into the same schools with literal murderers attending. Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.
It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society and it's a loophole when they try to sell that concept to the rest of society as "we can teach better for cheaper so give us your tax money and let us replace universal public education" rather than "we have thrown some of your children on the scrapheap for you to expensively support for the rest of their lives and either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value".
Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large.
Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather than teaching, the result wasn't that the median student pulled the troublemaker up, it was that the troublemaker caused the entire classroom to not learn anything.
Society would have been far better off to have the couple students unable to thrive in a conventional classroom go to an alternative school and have all the other students get a decent education.
> Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large.
Charter schools aren't needed for that though. Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most problematic kids into emotional/behavioral disability classrooms/schools, or in the worst cases sending the children to hospitals and group homes.
If public schools aren't doing this, there needs to be changes in administration, just like schools where they simply resort to arresting children and giving them police records for disobeying and being disruptive. Police shouldn't be involved at all for anything less than severe crimes.
>Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most problematic kids into emotional/behavioral disability classrooms/schools, or in the worst cases sending the children to hospitals and group homes.
The problem is that public schools can't do those things, for various political and social reasons. So the charter school thing is a workaround.
>If public schools aren't doing this, there needs to be changes in administration,
Again, this is a political problem, since administrators are picked by the local government. There's only so much administrators can do anyway. Ultimately, the whole thing seems to be a political and a cultural problem.
Of course it's a political problem. There are people who have been scheming how to dismantle public education. The short term goal is to funnel tax payer money to private schooling. The longer term goal is to make sure the lower classes simply don't ever get an education.
I can't speak on whether you're right, but there is genuinely a component where public schooling can't lump everyone together and expect things to work out. In high school, I knew someone who spread vicious rumors and made remarks about Nazi Germany and whatnot. Supposedly on the autism spectrum, although that's not an excuse either way. He was smart enough, but seemed more interested in aggravating and harassing people. There needs to be a separate schooling environment for people like that, one way or another.
And speaking of Germany, over there they don't lump everyone together: somewhere around high school level, they split everyone into one of 3 tracks. Only one of those leads to college, the other two are for low-performers, and for people destined for the trades. Looking at the state of German industry, I'd say the system works out much better than the American system. However, a lot of leftists complain about it because it's somehow "unfair" for low-performing kids to not be grouped in with high performers where they can magically become better students by interacting with them...
The incentive is : keep your job / don't get sued.
The law requires certain accommodations for students with disabilities and local elections should handle the rest. All that requires is an engaged community and parents can be extremely vocal/involved. Cities can have good reason to lean on schools too, because good schools bring people into an area and they bring money with them. In that sense, public schools do compete. Families and young adults looking to start them don't want to move to areas without good schools.
Incentives are there, it just takes work and paying attention. A lot of people don't even bother voting in local elections and those that do don't always give much thought to who to elect as superintendent or to the school board. When communities don't take the time to invest in their schools they don't get much out of them. It's part of the reason why poor communities that lack the time/money/energy to be as involved tend to have poorer quality schools. Adding to that are the wealthy families that move to where schools are better or don't move into those areas at all.
So you kind of just explained why public schools aren't actually competing, at least in poor areas. The issue is that many of the families in these areas do actually care about education, but are unable fix their schools because of others apathy. What should they do?
Organize. Campaign. Reach out to other parents. Name and shame. Apathy is hard to overcome, but most people already want good schools. Even people without kids don't want to be surrounded by uneducated people and don't want to deal with the problems they cause. Making time for local politics is a hard sell, but I've become increasingly convinced that it's our best chance to enact meaningful changes and improve our day to day lives.
This has already been happening and the result in many states is that the path of least resistance is to increase the decision making power of families.
Everyone voting with their feet is functionally equivalent to removing the disruptive kids from class, even though it might not seem like that if one has ideological blinders on.
You need only look at the Moms for Liberty types to see what small but well-organised campaigns can do. If you don't make time for local politics, others will.
I’d argue that the majority of people have some desire to be good at their job, and take some pride in that. Competition is a terrible substitute for an effective culture, especially in environments dominated by externalities such as the entire lives of the children that are taught. I doubt many teachers spend much time checking other classrooms to see who is best, they have more important work to be getting on with
I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education.
As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes!
However, the question of "how to do a good job educating kids" on a national level must include everyone in the measure. It might be worth having schools for troubled kids! But you have to look across the results of the troubled kids and the more normate ones. I think the root comment's point is that...this seems to have copied the techniques that charter schools use to improve their educational outcomes...but that arguably those schools are not "solving" the same problem as public schools and comparing them does not reveal any insights.
Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc
Agreed. It’s uselessly idealist to imagine you can serve the 100% without making the 99% much worse off. Actually worse than useless — it’s making things worse for the 99%!
Having seen just how much damage a single disruptive student can do, I think there must be alternatives for those that need them — if only to stop disrupting everyone else.
> If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education
Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.
> Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.
Of course it's an option: this is why charter schools, private schools and home schools are increasingly popular!
Government education is the only meaningful way in which the majority of people are prohibited from meaningful choices for their kids because the government says "but what about the bottom 5%" -- so folks _opt out_ of government education entirely.
This is why "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists are trying to make opting out as difficult as possible -- even though "marginalized minorities" disproportionately support opting out.
But despite the "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists, the alternatives are increasingly popular. It's slow, but there is improvement on the alternatives.
> As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers.
That’s not quite the point. By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids, beyond what would be possible by mixing everyone together. So you can achieve a net societal improvement that way.
If those excluded kids are just moved from selective charter schools to non-selective public schools then, by the same argument, they'll be reducing the outcomes of the non-disruptive kids who don't have parents involved enough to take advantage of the system.
So unless these charter schools have a side business selling Soylent Green made from disruptive pupils and those with learning disabilities, they're not actually improving overall results.
> By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids
Isn't this is what the root comment is saying? I did not summarize the entire thing but that was my understanding of its point.
> you can achieve a net societal improvement that way.
You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of society.
> You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of society.
That depends on the improvement vs loss -- IME, it is a net improvement.
With 100 students, 5 are disruptive, verbally abusive, maybe physically violent. How much does that 5% bring down the other 95%? If we remove that 5% from the other 95%, how much does the 5% lose versus the 95% gain?
IME, the gains in the 95% are miles ahead of the losses in the 5%, which makes it's net improvement.
I have no kids. My support of charters has nothing to do with that, especially seeing as I would live in a good public school district anyway.
I thought this was clear with the comment but I don't think charter schools teach better or cheaper. They just make it easier for kids to succeed by removing distractions. Before charters almost all of the poor children in the district were being thrown on the scrapheap. Now many of them are getting the education they deserve. I'll admit that I have no perfect solution. I'm not sure there is one. But it seems clear to me that I can't sit by and allow underprivileged students to face the conditions they historically have at public schools here.
They are the minority. They clearly don't function well in the conventional school setting. They are struggling to learn the material. They learn how to disrupt though, and how the grown-ups around them are powerless. They learn to be constantly blamed, and feel miserable, defiant, or both. A lot of wrong lessons.
This makes the lives of these disruptive kids worse. Being in a public school robs them of a chance to become decent people and get an education. These kids should receive a special education, tailored to their special needs, like e.g. autistic kids get a special education.
I think you're giving them a little too much credit. Plenty of disruptive kids have a perfectly fine home life, have an iPhone, get expensive toys or technology bought for them. A lot of them are just jerks who were never punished by their parents, received few punishments from teachers and staff who had little power, and enjoy being disruptive or bullying others, and don't give a shit if they flunk all their tests or classes. The teachers say they're going to become a janitor or drop out of high school at this rate, and they don't care because they've been told this all their lives, because their disruptive behaviors haven't gotten better since kindergarten, only gotten more violent and more sexual. And somehow they manage to squeak by to the next grade.
I say this speaking from my own experience as someone who went to a Title 1 school before taking a test to get into a magnet program when transitioning to high school (about age 14); the difference in disruptive behavior was like night and day to me. I still remember it very clearly.
If education can improve the most by punishing and expelling disruptive students more often, sending them to other schools, I wouldn't be opposed. It would help the non-disruptive majority of students reach their full potential, which is a better outcome than trying to help the disruptive minority at the expense of everyone else.
I agree, a lot of disruptive kids are not highly disadvantaged. Their problem is a bad environment that helped develop their worst attitudes, so they do enjoy disrupting, bullying, and seeing other kids and grown-ups dumbfounded and hurt.
This is not good for them already. The current public school system just keeps helping them develop these valuable antisocial skills. These kids keep thinking that everyone around are weak fools, and that their disruptive behavior is a way to win.
A different environment, where there is nobody to easily bully, where the grown-ups are not bemused or annoyed by their conduct but expect outbreaks and are prepared to handle them, where the kids are shown different examples of adult behavior that they are used to, might help. More, well-prepared psychologists who definitely should be present in such a school would help these kids understand themselves, their disruptive impulses, why these impulses are ultimately bad, and what ways out are there. These kids are still kids, many not even teenagers. They are still actively learning what a social life is; giving them a good example tailored to them is utterly important.
I do not expect 100% success rate, but I'm pretty certain that it might work much better than a typical helpless public school.
You said "punish" so many times. Punishing unruly kids doesn't stop them being unruly. They just learn to hate the system and everything in it.
I got expelled from 2 kindergardens, and then was sent to a Montessori school. Where I was fine, even helpful.
"the beatings will continue until behaviour improves" just doesn't work, has never worked.
Maybe we shouldn't have one school experience for all the kids. Maybe some kids work fine with an authoritarian system and like having a set of rules to follow. Other kids don't.
You are conflating two unrelated issues:
1. Letting students learn their own way as opposed to memorizing teachers' instructions
2. Letting disruptive kids disrupt education of their classmates
#1 is good, #2 is bad. In fact #1 never works when #2 is present.
I'm not an education expert. But I think you have to ask why the disruptive kids are being disruptive. It might be that #2 is caused by not having #1 (at least, that was my experience: I stopped being disruptive when they let me do my own thing).
I agree with you as a parent of a kid who has been labeled as disruptive. My kid is a smart sweet loving child who has big emotions and gets overstimulated. If anything he is bullied and taken advantage of by the other kids, yet he is the one who is disciplined because he has big reactions in the school setting. Kids can be really mean. In many sense the school is inflexible largely because of budget constraints. This is why we have large class sizes. Can you imagine handling 26-30 4th graders?
I am lucky in some sense because I can afford all the therapies, private tutors and teachers as necessary. I can throw money at the problem where as many kids have parents who cannot. Even then throwing money at the problem doesn't guarantee anything. You have to find the right fit for your kid and hopefully they learn the skills they need and adapt along the way.
To the rest of the commentors in the thread, you cannot segregate kids. The schools need to adapt to them and meet them where they are. In the US Federal Law guarantees this but the reality is that schools are underfunded by a huge amount so when we talk about individualized education and special education services, everything is cookie cutter.
BTW if any parent in this thread section can recommend a great public school system with appropriate Level 3 services please reply. I can literally move anywhere. A 70k a year private school would be hard to afford right now as would a $1-2 million dollar home in said school district but there is really no good information out there for parents.
I don't mean to say that everything should be authoritarian. But to maintain a good school for the students who go to a non-authoritarian school, there still needs to be some degree of punishment, or expulsions. Just like in a non-authoritarian government, people who commit violent crimes still need to be sent to jail for the safety of others. Once away from the others, they can be reformed and reintegrated back into a normal setting, where the teachers can trust students not to get into fights more, and kids can learn in a quiet environment where others also want to be high-achievers, or at least are motivated to not become drop-outs.
I just don't think there's enough of that in schools like the one I described. Sorry, I kind of let my past color my tone more than I should have.
I don't think having over-authoritarian discuplinarianism is ideal. It's probably a backlash to schools not having enough funding or resources to deal with the assaults and the fighting, so they do the exact opposite of what they'd been doing, or what they think of as the opposite. Going too far the other way, overly disciplining students for minor behavior and failing to change their behavior isn't best either.
Yeah, I sadly only heard about it, not actually witnessed it. It doesn't really work anymore, unfortunately, and criminals are kept alongside normal people for far longer than acceptable.
as someone who it has never worked for; you're so wrong.
I was beaten as a kid. It just made me angry. So f*cking angry. It didn't stop me from acting up. I learned to take the beating with pride. I got smarter about when to act up. Everyone involved, literally everyone, had a worse result from this.
I would have had such a better life (and everyone around me) if the people who were supposed to be taking responsibility for me had actually stopped beating me and tried understanding me (like they were supposed to).
A related saying of some guy who knew this stuff: "You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long". You can force people with punishment, but they will try to revolt and get revenge once they have a chance; even a small chance, and a small revenge.
> either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value
Or genuinely think it's of net positive value.
One disruptive kid can spoil the educations of 29 others pretty easily, and probably won't even gain anything from staying in school. It's a dead-weight loss. But we're too chickenshit to openly do anything about it, so the rich buy their way away from the bad kids one way or another, and the decent-but-poor get to suffer.
This happened to me, and was one reason why my parents pulled me out of school and I taught myself at home with a standardized curriculum.
It was only 1 kid in the class, but he was ruining the entire class almost every day, and the administration didn't want to risk the political fallout.
It was great to be able to learn as fast as I wanted with no distractions. Sometimes what has to be learned wasn't interesting and I didn't go any faster at it, but I did pull ahead in math by a couple years by 8th grade.
> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain.
If you kick out the problematic students, the only students you have left are easy to teach non-problematic students.
> and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain.
It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will be the best. It is a direct application of selection bias. Public schools will be left with whatever students are not accepted into charter schools...those "problematic students", and will...again...due to selection bias have worse results.
> It's not like they're only accepting kids with two parents, in fact they're doing a much better job of helping poor families in my district than the public school system
That's great for your district, but parent pointed out ending school at noon on Wednesday are going to apply selection bias. Perhaps your district does it better.
> If you kick out the problematic students, the only students you have left are easy to teach non-problematic students.
Maybe the negative effects of having problematic students is enough that its a worthwhile endeavor? By Middle school or high school "problematic students" involves people that not only are noisy and disruptive in class, but people that deal drugs, rob people, steal, join gangs, bring weapons to school. Just calling them problematic is really underselling the situation. And the effects of a student that routinely swears at a teacher and causes fights disrupts a large number of students preventing them from learning things.
Wow they sound really undesirable. I wonder if there's some place you could concentrate such people to reduce their impact? Maybe some sort of camp, idk.
In all seriousness once you start thinking of huge swathes of children as a problem in this way, the "solutions" become clear and atrocious. You have to find another path sorry.
When the actual fix (improving the lives, discipline, and care provided by their parents) is untenable, other lower effort solutions start to become more attractive. It's unreasonable to expect schools to correct for a poor upbringing.
I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. Maybe the public school system is failing its students. However, it always seemed unfair to trap parents who would otherwise have other options in a failing system. Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation to their children?
> I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing.
I am going to give my kid all the advantages I can, of course. But...personal optimization != societal optimization. Yes, I can put my kid in a better spot to succeed, but we aren't making progress as a society, things are getting very much worse actually (e.g. income inequality).
> Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation to their children?
Again, those kids left behind...they are going to be expensive in terms of prisons, homeless services, lost productivity, etc...You can see this happening already, it is just going to be much worse when our kids are adults. And really, this is the only time we (or society) will have much influence on these kids. It is much easier to set a kid straight than try to fix an adult.
>I am going to give my kid all the advantages I can, of course. But...personal optimization != societal optimization. Yes, I can put my kid in a better spot to succeed, but we aren't making progress as a society, things are getting very much worse actually (e.g. income inequality).
Good intentions but empirically it doesn't work; forcing troublesome kids to be in school with the kids who genuinely want to learn drags down the score of the kids who want to learn and doesn't improve outcomes for the troublesome kids. Countries with school choice like Sweden have much better educational outcomes than the US.
I suspect there are at least a few major confounding variables when comparing Swedish to US schools. You know, like... almost everything about how the society works?
It seems that you suppose that keeping those kids in "normal" school is better for them than moving them to some schools tailored to their needs.
There is nothing obvious about that. Removing the worst disruptors from standard classes may be a win-win. People are diverse and cannot be all served by a one-size-fits-all school type.
> It is much easier to set a kid straight than try to fix an adult
Is this true? Adults have free will & personal responsibility, kids are sort of at the whim of their parents and have no real legal rights when it comes to escaping a bad situation
Adults have a life time to be set in their ways. Kids, at least before they are teenagers, are extremely impressionable. While we can't fix crappy home lives, we can give them a chance at school.
Framing the situation as kids being "left behind" feels disingenuous if not outright inflammatory.
Many European systems have been thriving for decades with different school options for different students, based on interest, aptitude, etc. We'd be far better off as a society if we had one classroom for the 8th graders who read at a 1st grade level and one classroom for the 8th graders ready for Infinite Jest. The curriculum and instruction could then be tailored to the needs of each group. Instead, we lump them all together and end up with an outcome where the majority of the students are underperforming their potential.
So basically the solution is to identify problematic kids very early, then take them away from their parents and put them in institutions to be raised by the state.
Because what you're expecting is for schools to take the place of parenting. If you're going to do that, you might as well just cut the parents and families out of the equation altogether.
I don't think anyone is going to say "offering parents more choices is bad." But the political reality is not simply "offering more choices." The political reality typically entails using funds set aside for public schools for charter schools. In reality, what happens all too often is that funding and resources are stripped away from the already resource poor schools and given to charter schools.
And that's probably why people seem as if they're saying "Charter schools bad." I'd argue they're really saying "Taking funds away from public schools to give to charter schools bad." We're creating a system where the already struggling schools will then be put on a downward spiral, unable to recover.
But I think our educations system is screwed up and we need to invest more resources into education at all levels, so what do I know.
There's also the moral question of your whole "it sucks for children of uncaring parents" quote, which I personally think is quite a selfish and uncaring perspective, that is also probably grossly not the truth for the variety of parents in lower performing schools, but I'm not going to get into that.
> In reality, what happens all too often is that funding and resources are stripped away from the already resource poor schools and given to charter schools.
Where are you seeing this? D.C. has almost half of its students in charter schools, and it also has public schools that are funded more than almost anywhere else in the U.S.
Worth pointing out that the charter school enrollment is highest in the poorest wards with the greatest percent of the black population. It’s lowest in the richest wards with the greatest percent of the whtie population. See for yourself[1].
Like with the claims of “underfunded public schools,” a lot of these conversations seem to stem from people hearing talking points and assuming that they’re true, while not bothering to look at the facts that show the opposite to be the case.
>Worth pointing out that the charter school enrollment is highest in the poorest wards with the greatest percent of the black population. It’s lowest in the richest wards with the greatest percent of the whtie population. See for yourself[1].
Now, what exactly do you think this is telling you?
Segregationists tried using that framing back in the 1960s/70s, but it the argument was ruled invalid by the Warren-led Supreme Court. Who knows what would happen these days, however.
Joel Greenblatt has schools that focus almost entirely on low income / underprivileged students. Their results were really good last I checked (pre-COVID, so things may have changed). It doesn’t have to be about one race vs another. Choice can be good for all.
Edit: I should note, I think he doesn’t focus on race, but I got the impression that his students are predominantly minorities.
> “I don’t want my kids to go to a school that will fail to educate them” makes you exactly the opposite.
And if you just happen know that the second overlaps with the former, you can convince yourself that you aren't an asshole. The segregationists of the 60s were self convinced they weren't assholes.
As to my earlier comment, I don't think anyone is saying "We shouldn't educate students" (except the parent comment that was like "only for kids whose parents care.") And for me, public schools are for the education of all the children in the district. In my head, I don't really separate the two. I believe in education for all, despite what resources their parents have. I'm going to reject the premise that I'm just for public schools just because. To me, it's one and the same.
If public schools aren't for the education of students, what are they for? To follow your question, if not public schools, do we just change all schools to charter and private schools and have the state fund them? (Well, then don't they just become public schools with slightly different administrations, that over time will surely become just another public school system?)
I should reiterate: I'm not saying that we shouldn't have school choice, but my very real concern is that school choice usually means that we take funding from one school, to send it to another school. And this is what happening* (* depending on the state/district you live in, maybe not. But it's happening in plenty of other locales.)
I think for a lot of middle class parents, Charter schools are very appealing. But I'm also talking about the students who need the most help. So the real question becomes "funds set aside for the education of _which_ students in the district."
Well, let's go back to the original post. Why do people go on and on about how school choice is bad? It's not about school choice. It's about school resources. It's politics. Who gets what, where, when and how. If the education system in America was so rich in cash that we were paving the hallways of schools with gold bricks, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. But they are not. It's a question of resources and how to direct those resources for the most good. And guess what, everyone is going to have a slightly different opinion of what "good" is.
But back to your question: Why aren't we trying to educate children in the district?
Okay, if it helps students, and if your tax payer dollars are there to educate that student, what's the problem? The reality is, this typically leaves the schools that are already struggling to fall further behind.
Teaching is hard. Teaching students who don't want to be there, don't care, have special needs, or a poor family life is even more so. This is especially the case because Teachers are asked to do a lot more than just teach English and Math, but rather provide some of the resources that may not be provided by their family or society at large.
All schools and school systems have their own needs and issues. And largely what happens is that schools which have the least resources need the most resources to be successful. There's also a very real economy of scale that can occur at schools, and once resources start getting stripped, those economy of scales start falling apart, and now those dollars you do have, don't go as far.
Getting teachers to work at Title 1 schools is hard. You need to pay them higher salaries. You need more resources, such as school psychologists, school resource officers, teacher aids, etc. Even things like having parents come in to volunteer is more of an issue, and if you don't have those volunteers, where do you get the replacement labor from?
Not too many people are creating (good) Charter schools to serve these students needs (not to say there aren't, there are some good schools out there, but not enough of them.)
I work in education (but you couldn't pay me enough to teach high school in America). I see the issues with the system everyday. The system is broken. Teachers are underpaid, overworked and leaving in droves. If you look at the statistics for number of students in education departments in colleges to become teachers, it has drastically fallen over the past 15 years. (I literally tell students of mine that are interested in education to stay away.) That's not likely to change in the foreseeable future.
Students are not getting the education they deserve. There aren't enough teachers. There are bad teachers. All too often the bureaucracy is uncaring and unyielding, and that's not a great way to educate individuals. Students are getting passed through the system regardless if they're learning or not.
The issue I have with your question is this: Are we trying to educate _all_ children in the district or are we trying to educate _your_ children in the district? Because if it's just your children, charter schools would be great. If it's all children, we can't just rely on Charter schools to solve all the inherent problems with the system (because they're not just going to magically fix things). We're going to have to reach deep down, work harder, and make a lot of even tougher decisions to fix the broken education system in America.
I may not have made my distinction clearly enough.
My city’s school district total proposed budget is $245M for next year. Enrollment is just shy of 7K.
One framing is “that $245M is for running the schools”
Another framing is “that $35K is for the education of each student in Cambridge”
The first leads you to conclude “of course we wouldn’t let a parent take even a dime of that money to put their kid in private school”
The second leads you to “of course they should have the choice to use at least 50% of that $35K allocated to each student to attend a school of their choice”
Of course the public schools are there for the education of students, but the difference in framing is whether the money starts there or rather ends there for students who choose to attend it.
> I don't think anyone is going to say "offering parents more choices is bad."
Well, I will say that more-choice is not axiomatically good.
Imagine that on Monday the cafeteria has a choice of beef/chicken/vegetarian, and on Tuesday it adds a fourth option for methamphetamines.
There is strictly more choice, and the people who choose it might even express extreme levels of satisfaction... but somehow it doesn't seem like an improvement.
The philosophical issue is charter schools use public resources yet are not accountable to the public. Adding to that, having public education system that is available to the public is kind of the key part here. So, the practical issue is that if some students are being excluded, that misses the point of public education terribly (other practical issues involve profiteering by the charters, just like with private prisons). Additionally, having several overlapping choices with government funding is an inefficient use of the money.
As far as choice, there's nothing wrong with that, and religious and other private schools (which didn't get public funds) have co-existed with public schools almost everywhere well before our lifetimes. So equating charter schools (or vouchers) with choice in this context is disingenuous.
>The philosophical issue is charter schools use public resources yet are not accountable to the public.
They absolutely are accountable to the public in their school district, who can choose to send their kids not to that school if they don't like the school, depriving the school of revenue.
> >The philosophical issue is charter schools use public resources yet are not accountable to the public.
> They absolutely are accountable to the public in their school district, who can choose to send their kids not to that school if they don't like the school, depriving the school of revenue.
Having a choice between charter school and public school without enough resources to provide even basics to its students is not a choice. It's even worse because parents of children in public schools most likely also lack resources to help their children(be it material or cultural). So children in public schools end with a double whammy, neither parents(or parent) or school can help them.
Where are these mythical schools "without enough resources to provide even the basics" ? They don't exist, this is a canard that won't die. Public schools in the US are funded extravagantly. The worst performing schools have the biggest funding per student.
Some kids want to learn, some don't. Some parents value education, some don't. Not even a billion dollars per student will change that.
Simplistic arguments like this are one of the more annoying parts of the rhetoric of charter school advocates. It assumes that all charter schools are of high quality and that making education yet another thing that is economically stratified in the US is good. It’s ok to say that things that sound nice like choice in education can have knock on effects that are bad for society.
It seems like a charter school that develops a reputation for low quality is a self-solving problem in a way that a public school which develops the same reputation is (currently) not.
One goes out of business; the other goes along indefinitely, with perhaps the wealthiest parents nearby withdrawing their kids, but most families and children are forced to endure it or move away.
The feedback loop in education is several years long. Before a charter school develops a bad reputation, they just change their name, put up a banner declaring "Under New Management" and continue right along with better PR.
My district spends $29k per student. More than almost any other in the world. Yet some of its schools are so bad that a quarter of high schoolers opted out. It's not about funding. It's an overwhelmingly blue area, politicians are not purposefully sabotaging the schools. The government is just utterly incompetent, and worse, corrupt. And unfortunately many of the students are from households that don't emphasize the importance of education.
Your implication that conservative politicians are more likely to be sabotaging schools than democratic politicians is hilarious. I'm quite certain both sides are equally adept at throwing good money after bad so long as the present policy they pursue is fashionable and focus group tested. They're incompetent, as you say, or, perhaps, they just aren't willing to risk their own political future because the changes that might make a difference will be unpopular with voters.
My reading of "purposefully sabotaged" is that whoever was in charge of the schools decided to make them worse for political reasons, like not believing in public education. I'm not aware of any dems doing this. I certainly agree that they have accidentally sabotaged schools through incompetence or corruption, but that's a much harder problem to fix than "just don't vote for people that don't believe in public education".
My point was that elections here are almost always about improving public schools, but the government has not been able to over the course of decades. Call their stewardship what you will. Purposeful sabotage, accidental sabotage, whatever, doesn't really matter to me. What matter is that the government is not capable of enacting the voters will of having good public schools, which is why charters are so popular.
It's similar problem to drugs. We have populist solutions that don't work and solutions that work but will make you unelectable. Guess what solutions will get implemented? Also it doesn't matter how much money is spent per child if almost all of it is spent on turning school into day prisons for children. Students from poor families need more resources to be able to achieve same as children who have richer families. Family support goes a long way. This includes material support and cultural one. Parents often don't know how or have resources to help their children. Easiest solution would be for schools/government to help their parents so their children could rely on their family for support. Helping whole family is not only good for children but also to whole community. It was shown that hungry students have lower achievements than feed ones but we still pretend like only thing that matters is personal learning ethics, so we don't have to feed them.
Keep in mind that the North also had it's share of segregation and discrimination against poor(and by proxy Irish, Poles etc) and people of colour. It includes schools.
Also property tax as way of funding schools is awful.
Spends 29k on what? School infrastructure is crumbling around the country. Teachers are paid so little most of them could get a raise working at Costco. This country has engendered in every sector that matters a fleet of middle managers and administrators whose purpose is to extract value and provide little. Maybe we can start by trimming that away, something teachers have been saying for years.
And as for the overwhelmingly blue thing, that’s another simplistic narrative. Substantive politics in the US has very little to do with the party that you vote for, as the parties agree on 99% of the particulars, if not the rhetoric. Illinois is one of the bluest states in America and Chicago one of the bluest cities, and yet Rahm Emmanuel ran under a dem regime one of the most infamous regimes of city-wide austerity in recent memory. The Daleys were out and out corrupt racists. I could go on.
I don’t believe that public schooling, an actually lindy institution worldwide, an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s (wonder what happened then hmm) that has produced world renowned schools in the US in particular, is more of a house of cards than the Potemkin village that is charter and private schools.
> an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s
Was it really? With corporal punishment, public humiliation, and outright bullying? I would never want to live or return to a time when in loco parentis permitted schools to be run like fiefdoms.
You'll need to provide evidence that public schools were working well in the 70s and 80s. Graduation rates today are higher than those decades. High school was optional for many parts of the country.
The reason for the outcry now, is that we measure everything, and even the wealthier areas of the country are unable to perform to any reasonable standard.
Graduation rates don't actually reflect on the quality of education, I don't think, unless you're controlling for a lot of other variables. I don't typically see people controlling for them, e.g. a politician might brag that graduation rates are up in their district, arguing that education has improved, while ignoring the underlying reason that standardized tests got easier or the schools spent more time test-prepping and less time educating.
Note: not working well in the 70s and 80s, working will up until the 70s and 80s. But gladly, this is a great resource: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf.
At the exact point in our history that we should've accelerated spending in public resources we did an about face in the opposite direction towards privatization and the growth of the administrator class. All of our institutions (healthcare, finance, infrastructure, education, etc.) have been low-productivity money pits since then.
Graduation rates and attendance were even lower before the 70's, so I'm not sure what fantasy world you might be referring to. Are you referring to segregated schools? That probably wasn't an ideal system.
Oh. I assumed we were sharing information, not exchanging insults. I'm not sure what segregation has to do with anything, the data doesn't align, and many of the states focused on are in the north anyways. If you can't see the gigantic drop in test scores, lower velocity on all fronts save spending, and corresponding drop in productivity then that's ok.
But that's not the entire story. It's also the fact that not having to deal with the terrible kids helps the remaining kids. Fewer class disruptions. Less slowing down the class to pretend to let the slowest and least motivated keep up. Etc.
This comes at the cost of concentrating the troublemakers in other places, making them far worse for normal kids stuck there.
> It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will be the best.
You're implying that individual results don't change by grouping the good students together. In your vision the good students stay good and the bad stay bad. I don't agree. The good students become great by surrounding them with other good students.
If that's true then the converse is also true: bad students become bad by surrounding them with other bad students.
And the charter school gets to take credit for the "good" outcome while the public school gets blamed for the bad outcome that is a direct result of the good outcome.
Which, if we accept your premise, suggests that the charter schools aren't providing any net benefit, they're just taking credit. If this is really the way we want to operate things we could just do it in public schools.
> If that's true then the converse is also true: bad students become bad by surrounding them with other bad students.
The converse does not have to be true, only the contrapositive.
And in the case of a human’s tendencies, it is easier to become less disciplined than it is to become more disciplined. Bad habits are easier and likelier to pickup than good habits. Forming a tight knit high trust family/community is much more difficult than dissolving it. Etc.
I do think that the students who don't get accepted into the selective schools need better options. It's just when the options are keep all the students together or separate them and some will become better and some will become worse I think providing the students who want to succeed with a way to accomplish their goals is the correct choice. Hopefully there will be another option that isn't so exclusionary in the future.
I'm not super interested in who gets the credit here. If the public schools were able or willing to kick out problematic students like the charter schools then I think we should be doing that instead of charters. But that's not the reality. So yes, I do think that outcomes overall are better, at least in my district, because of charters.
You sidestepped my point. Segregating all the underperformers into one place causes harm and you're ignoring that harm, assuming that the benefit of segregating the high performers is more important.
And you are in fact crediting the charter school with the benefit while ensuring that public schools receive blame for any harm that results.
I think you're actually arguing against universal instruction, that we shouldn't educate all students. Which we could do in public schools also! But you're not suggesting that at all.
I don't think I'm ignoring the harm. I am accepting it. We can get into the utilitarian calculus, but before even considering that I don't think it's acceptable to force students who want to succeed into classrooms with those that don't. And really that's the end of the story for me. Maybe the total outcome is worse because the kicked out students cause much bigger problems than they would otherwise but that doesn't mean we should force the other students to suffer. I don't feel right dooming those kids to a poor education.
The public schools do deserve blame for putting all the under privileged kids together. The charters deserve credit for allowing them to separate themselves. I don't think that's intrinsic to public schooling, it's just the circumstance we are in.
> I don't think it's acceptable to force students who want to succeed into classrooms with those that don't
Now you're ascribing a specific cause and moralizing, assuming that it's harder for some subset of students because they want to fail, and that they deserve to fail. The utilitarian calculus does matter, you feel fine dooming some set of kids to a poor education because you think they deserve it.
No child deserves a poor education. We do have to choose who we prioritize and I don't really think your analysis of who "deserves" more help is sound.
Equating underperforming students with disciplinary problem students seems to be a common problem in this thread. There are many underperforming students who would perform much better without being subjected to a threatening or harassing environment.
Public schools attempt to provide universal education, which is at direct odds with bad-faith students that poison the well.
In fact, in some places where this is legal, public schools get better when they can expel criminal minors into the charter system.
Separating the worst offenders from the other students might also match these students with resources that are most equipped to help them (eg. counselors that might help to reduce gang violence).
Those “underperformers” aren’t being helped in either case. If we can dilute these problematic people into the general population maybe we won’t notice the pool smells distinctly like urine - aka the kiddie pool.
Education isn’t hard or expensive. Providing therapy for years of trauma and neglect is. Trying to focus on algebra when your home life is totally whack is hard. Otherwise what’s the cost of education.. chalk and plastic chairs?
Valuing public welfare is great, but so are the virtues that promote healthy families. Education is done by parents and there’s lots of adults with children who aren’t parents. Personal responsibility is a concept that will actually enrage otherwise intelligent people
You're conflating two kinds of bad students: the stupid ones and the poorly-behaved ones. Students with lower intellectual capacities should absolutely be helped; students who are disruptive, not so much. They may need to be sacrificed so the majority can have a decent learning environment.
The problem 10% bring down everyone else by monopolizing teacher attention. Let’s also not forget that many of these problem students are extremely violent with broken homes. Many of them eventually get transferred to prisons masquerading as schools, but that can take time, and long after they’ve done the damage to everyone else.
> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain.
I'm provisionally accepting this as true, partly because there's some truth in it and partly because I think it leads to an interesting discussion. This is great for the remaining students at the charter school.
That problem student goes somewhere, though. That problematic student still exist. They are now in another class, with other students. Some of those students are problematic and some are not, but per your premise -- that other class is now worse than it was. You haven't improved anything, you've just taken a disadvantage from one place and given it to another.
One might consider a scenario where this happens repeatedly, and you just get a class full of problematic kids. Those kids don't learn anything, but at least the non-problematic kids do.
There are several problems with that scenario, but one such problem is independent of ethical concerns: You just aren't going to find the people to run that school or teach that class for the amount society is willing to pay. Schools for behaviorally problematic students exist. They tend to be private, expensive, and full. They also tend to focus on students who e.g. assault other students in the middle of class, rather than on students who e.g. won't stop talking in class even if repeatedly removed from class, or even students with out-of-school criminal records.
Removing special needs kids from your population is the quickest way to increase test scores and reduce budget. As a parent of a child with special needs, I've studied the financials of schools in my district to find out how special needs services are supported.
1) The federal government has never lived up to its promise of matching 40% of the special needs funding (in my state they cover a mere 8%).
2) Usually the shortfall ends up at the district level. Some districts get more funding from an increased special needs population while others don't (community funding model).
3) Often the district moves programs around so special needs child cohorts (and in some cases teachers) can remain intact while not focusing the lowered scores in one school.
4) Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before.
> Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before.
This is probably state-dependent, in California charters have the same obligations (with two different organizational ways of addressing them, either as if they were their own district or as part of the local district) as other public schools with regard to special education.
The charters in my district absolutely support special needs children. I even know a couple special needs teachers at the big charter network. I can't say how their program compares to the public school system's but there it's not empty so I figure it can't be that bad.
“ Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.”
But it is sort of what schools currently do. The filter public schools use is housing. You have to buy a home in the school district. That is the reason real estate values are driven by school test scores. Because the opposite is also true: school test scores are a function of who own homes near the school. At the end of the day, maybe that operates better at sorting good apples from bad. I’m probably more in agreement with your line of thinking that making choice easier for poor folks could be best for society, but the selection effect is weaker if you loosen the filter.
Serious question: you don't see a dilemma in kicking out those who seem problematic? I absolutely hear you that a parent wants the best for their kid. But historically declaring that some students are an issue has been a frought road.
Of course I see the dilemma. To be honest I just care more about the students who want to succeed than the ones that don't. Every student deserves a high quality education, and that just isn't possible to provide when you're distracted by other students. I care about the other kids too, for ethical as well as utilitarian reason, and I do think we need to think hard about how they can be best served. But the status quo is not working, I don't think it's fair to continue to deprive underprivileged students of the opportunities they deserve.
Let’s assume there will be some % of kids that lack interest in learning, have no parental or community support, and despite schools providing them additional support for years they show no improvement or desire to improve. I think it’s reasonable some % of these people will always be in the population pool. What is the solution for these individuals?
That's quite a big assumption, but what do you think will happen if you don't offer them any education? They won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, which is far more expensive.
Assuming such a group exists, the point is that if you do offer them an education (or, rather, try to force it upon them), they won't accept it, so they still won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, but now their peers don't get an education either and suffer the same fate.
“Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.“
If this were unequivocal, people like me wouldn’t fundamentally hate the concept of charter schools. You think “one bad apple spoils the bunch” and that’s an observed effect not a law of nature.
You can like charter schools, but don’t pretend that privatization of public resources for means tested approved individuals is an absolute virtue. The world is complicated.
The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care?
By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?".
In the US it used to be more acceptable to put students in classes based on where they were academically and in terms of behavior. Truly disruptive kids were also usually suspended until eventually being expelled.
Neither approach is considered appropriate anymore. It was a central thesis of No Child Left Behind, which is/was nice in theory, but not in practice.
Now schools are data obsessed. Bad metrics like suspensions, expulsions, etc are avoided because suspensions are correlated to bad test scores and bad future outcomes for students. So schools now measure performance against that. The problem is obviously correlation vs causation, but if that is how you are graded as a principal that is what you are going to work towards to keep your job.
The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids. Slow learners really aren’t much of an issue because they don’t disrupt other kids learning beyond maybe needing more teacher attention.
> The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids.
This kind of attitude is a wide-open door for racist and classist attitudes to penalize kids of color, kids from poor homes, kids with unsafe or unstable home situations. Suspending and expelling kids almost always makes things worse for those kids.
There are HUGE racial and gender disparities in the rates of suspension and expulsion[1].
Anecdotally, I know a lot of educators and child social workers who are strongly opposed to suspension & expulsion as a punishment or a "solution". None of them cite "metrics obsession" as their reason, but rather the fact that the kids who are getting kicked out of school need more support, not less.
Maybe it seems fine to kick [other people's] kids out of school "for the good of the many", but happens next? What if parents loose their job because they have to stay home for childcare? What if folks end up homeless because they can't pay the bills? What if those kids end up in prisons (that our taxes pay for)? Just from a financial perspective, school is an EXTREMELY cost-effective early intervention compared to prisons, inpatient mental health, welfare systems, etc. Well educated folks often end up making money and paying into tax systems rather than drawing from them.
>There are HUGE racial and gender disparities in the rates of suspension and expulsion[1].
Because there are huge racial and gender disparities in problem behavior. The bleeding hearts don't seem to care about the kids that suffer in a classroom that is being constantly disrupted by these problem kids, many of those suffering being underprivileged minorities. Whatever the solution is to these kids that "need more support not less", the cost shouldn't be borne by the kids that come to school everyday wanting to learn. This idea that society must endlessly prostrate itself to the least privileged is a failed ideology.
There are huge racial and gender disparities in all sorts of things. More than half of black children are in single parent households compared to 20% of white children. You can't just look at racial outcomes and determine discrimination without asking whether priorities and choices are also different between the groups.
Au contraire! I can and do look at racial outcomes and determine discrimination without asking whether priorities and choices are also different between the groups because I have good intentions in my heart and my race card is not yet maxed out!
I don’t disagree with you. All of what you said can be true and not change that 1 or 2 kids in a class can derail it for the other 20.
So pragmatically, with limited resources, how should those resources be spent? On the 20 kids with a moderate to high chance of succeeding or on the 2 kids with a very low chance?
From a societal ROI perspective it is pretty obvious.
> The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care?
This is relevant point to the military thing. If you screw up at school, your military parents will be called -- and it may impact them directly. As in, Sgt. X, your kid keeps picking fights, and we're going to punish them, and you, for it.
It's a very important question. I don't have the answer. What I do know is that forcing underprivileged students to attend schools that cause them to fear for their safety or even life is inhumane. Charter schools are solving that in my district.
Based on your previous comment, the remaining 3/4 of students are all murderers, criminals, deviants, disabled, or with parents who aren’t concerned with their education; or some of those 3/4 of students are somewhere in the middle but had their educations diminished by the removal of the better behaved students.
Well no, most of them are in the wealthier areas and don't have to worry about the violence the poor schools experience. There certainly still are deserving students stuck in failing schools and I think that's a tragedy. I don't see why that means we should undo a program that has been helping though.
Maybe find something more effective than public schools at turning them around. Their track record certainly indicates a different approach is needed.
Just because the kids happen to be in government run schools, that doesn't mean that an effective intervention into their lives can be performed there.
Schools should be about education, not solving all of society's ills. It is intolerable that one child who disrupts the education environment should be able to prevent so many others from learning. Take the child out of the situation so the others can learn and then figure out what's going on.
Children's public education is an _everybody_ problem. How these bulk problems are handled is something everybody should agree on instead of acting like it's somebody else's problem.
Absolutely 100% incorrect. If the parents aren't willing or able to raise their children, someone has to. "Throw them away" is not a moral, ethical, or utilitarian answer.
At least from a purely utilitarian point of view, cost of educating and raising a child is exorbitant (teachers, food, clothing, shelter, etc) compared to euthanizing them (1 to 5 bullets, executioner pay, and burial costs). Benefits are going to be somewhat iffy; yes they could turn out okay but it's just as likely they could turn into criminal offenders that will chew up resources of the criminal justice system which is quite a lot more expensive.
I will emphasize that this is strictly from a utilitarian point of view. I make no comments on the moral, ethical, and legal issues.
I think you missed the "imprison them for 2 decades" part of euthanizing them in your consideration. It's fun to just make up how you think things should ideally work, but we're bounded by how things actually work.
The peers part is badly overlooked a lot is talked about how asian countries seem to have a better education system. But overlook the most important part of the education system in asia. The filtering that happens first by school where the top student go to particular schools then even in each grade the students are divided in class by how how good they are.
> It's obviously true for prestigious universities
This is a hard argument to make when the use of the gentleman's c is more widespread the more prestigious the school is. Driven students certainly attend prestigious institutions, but overall the prestige of the school a person attended is a very poor signal for the abilities of the person. I transferred from a prestigious private university to a large public university and didn't notice any major difference in the quality of students. The quality of the classes? yes—class size was a major difference. But the students seemed just as sharp in both settings, especially in upper-level classes.
Frankly, the major obvious difference was just money. Prestigious, private universities have rich kids in spades. I didn't notice any correlation between the money and the abilities of the person, though. At the end of the day the connections with those kids are where the university you attend really pays off.
> The same type of thing is in play in military schools. There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms. All the kids will be well fed and groomed and socialized.
I grew up near a military base, and that describes very very few people.
> no kids of poor single moms
I'd suggest taking a look at what the military pays before you make the claim no poor. As for single moms it turns out that divorce is a big problem and if your dad is stationed overseas for months at a time it's a lot like being a single parent, except with the constant wondering if you are going to get a letter saying your spouse has died.
> All the kids will be well fed
I'll give you that can be the case, if the MLM and the 30% interest on the new Dodge Charger didn't take all the money.
> groomed and socialized
It turns out that sending parents out of a child's life for long periods of time can cause lots of behavior issues, beyond often times people that make their way to the military come with a lot of baggage usually and although the military can be good at reforming people's lives into productive members of society it doesn't always translate to being a great parent.
It sounds like the kind of thing postulated by someone who didn't spend a lot of time around the military culture.
> I'd suggest taking a look at what the military pays before you make the claim no poor....All the kids will be well fed
to this point, there are a lot of military families on food stamps.
plenty of hillbillys and hoodrats. plenty of bad areas near military bases, too.
but living on base or around base leads to a pretty strong monoculture. you also have a motivated cadre of military spouses -- who are often nurses and teachers -- and who often have to work hard to get jobs at a local school or hospital. you often get qualified teachers and nurses far exceeding the level you'd normally find in the rural areas near bases.
Yes, in my experience rural areas around bases tend to be more well-off than rural areas not around bases -- the base stimulates the local economy quite a bit, if nothing else. (Otoh, the revolving door population is not great for stability.)
But FWIW I do not think the effect is even close to strong enough to explain the results in the article.
Enlisted military families with 2 dependents usually qualify for public assistance programs. It's less of a problem stateside, because jobs open to military spouses are fairly easy to find. Families stationed overseas often don't have this option, though.
> Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pick the kid up
This would be a more effective filtering technique if inconvenient minimum days weren't common in regular public schools.
The most effective filtering technique used by charter schools is... being a charter school.
Because it isn't the default option public school based on residency and requires an active choice, it automatically filters for active parents.
And because for most of the potential student base its farther from their default public school, it selects for logistical flexibility (loosely correlating to wealth and/or having a parent at home) as well.
Related, USAA was originally formed to offer insurance and later banking to military officers and their families. (They since expanded some offerings to enlisted and to civilians.)
It turns out that selecting for military officers has a beneficial impact on auto losses, putting USAA in a good position to offer competitive rates and outstanding service.
USAA also isn't a typical insurance underwriter. It's essentially a giant self-insurance co-op, and for decades they would just terminate service if they decided you were outside their risk window, whether you otherwise qualified or not.
not impressive pay, but decent, and regularly on the 1st and 15th. also adjusted for inflation, and has some other unique market facets, like having younger folks being generally fit and healthy, and older, retired military folks getting pensions.
compare that with your average career bartender or construction worker
This is the correct answer. When you drop off the bottom 30 percent of the population via the AFQT requirement (the part of the ASVAB that correlates well with IQ) you are getting rid of 100,000,000 nitwits. Further to those, you also get rid of the criminals, and psychos, and junkies. This makes the military a kind of modest elite. Their children reflect that and do reasonably well in school.
Are people with 125+ IQs enlisting? Not for the most part, but almost none of the 75 IQ people are enlisting, and they cause a wild disproportion of the problems in society.
The minimum ASVAB to enlist is 31, and there are waiver programs for that. This is not a good showing. I feel like people don't appreciate how little lower-enlisted people are paid, what terrible financial literacy abounds in the ranks, and how many kids live on base but are still very firmly living in poverty.
There are a lot of advantages to living on base, but this thread is pretending that the military has its shit together in ways that it absolutely does not. "All the kids will be well-fed and socialized" is bizarrely out of touch, specifically. There are functioning gangs on some larger military installations. Troops PCS every few years, making it difficult for kids to establish social groups. Most bases have a unit of MPs basically acting as child services.
I'd think a better place to look for filters would be entire schools -- BRAC has caused the closure of many schools, but I don't know how they select which schools to target for closure. I know of at least two larger bases which have no schools (students are bused to local civilian schools) but I know others who have kept their schools despite a lower overall population of families.
>> But there are key differences. For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.
>> “Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students.
So, you think it's worth dismissing an article that clearly calls out its measures, because they didn't "take it seriously enough" to renormalize their data against categories they likely don't have access to?
They're fully transparent about the measures of achievement they're looking at:
>> Their schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose eighth-grade reading scores outpaced national averages for white students.
>> Eighth graders whose parents only graduated from high school — suggesting lower family incomes, on average — performed as well in reading as students nationally whose parents were college graduates.
>> the military’s schools have made gains on the national test since 2013. And even as the country’s lowest-performing students — in the bottom 25th percentile — have slipped further behind, the Defense Department’s lowest-performing students have improved in fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading.
>> Despite their high performance, Black and Hispanic students, on average, still trail their white peers at Defense Department schools, though the gap is smaller than in many states. The Pentagon has also faced scrutiny for its handling of student misconduct at its schools, including reports of sexual assault.
> There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms
Plenty of poor single moms with well behaved kids. The eternal problem is the lack of discipline at home. Successful kids grow up with structure, not being told yes all the time, are held accountable, and have a soft place to land when they make mistakes.
That is certainly harder to do with a single parent home, but it happens all the time in multi-parent homes as well.
Most schools have one day a week with early release. That is not a feature of charter schools.
Additionally, kid’s are only as good as their parents can enable. Some parents see the schools as a babysitting service. Others see it as a reprieve from having their kids in the house.
If you have never been to a school to volunteer, go do it. You will see quite quickly that there are students who disrupt the classroom beyond teaching. The teacher must devolve the class to the lowest common denominator and thus the group suffers
Military households and the dependas that inhabit them aren't the stable footing you are imagining. The worst marriage stories I've heard happen under those circumstances.
The claim here is that the military families are /so much more stable/ that it explains their kids (collectively) performing better than every other state in the country.
Obviously the military provides some sort of economic lower bound. But it also applies a pretty harsh upper bound, and has all sorts of other effects that you would expect to push the mean down.
Yeah, came here to say this. My BIL is an educator who started with TFA and then stood up a charter school with KIPP before going into independent schools.
Obviously and predictably, his startup charter succeeded -- wildly! -- but, to hear him tell it, a charter dropped into a struggling district absolutely will. It just does so at the expense of the district, because it pulls away the kids with motivated, supportive, engaged parents.
Turns out: motivated, supportive, engaged parenting is one of the absolutely best predictors of student educational achievement. Who knew?
So, sure, charters hurt districts, but the takeaway isn't just educational policy. It notes how intersectional these problems inevitably are. Poverty is going to make it super hard, for example, for a parent to be as involved and engaged as they might be with more of a safety net.
Even if that is the case, it's better to have charter schools than none. Then at least the disruptive and/or violent kids that are unmotivated cannot disrupt the learning of kids that are motivated.
That being said, the existence of competition will raise the performance of all schools.
"For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job."
"Prudence Carter, a Brown University sociologist who studies educational inequality, said the Defense Department’s results showed what could happen when all students were given the resources of a typical middle-class child: housing, health care, food, quality teachers."
The article author argues that multiple factors contribute to this outcome, without identifying a dominant factor. Are you arguing that the selection effects you describe are the dominant factor?
> Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday.
You clearly have not had the pleasure of experiencing typical public schools in Washington state.
The schedules seemed designed to maximize hostility toward working parents. Inconsistent start and end times through the week, weird half days every week or every other week, and numerous random non-holiday off days throughout the year.
There is a school district in silicon valley, the cupertino schools, that have consistent high scores. This makes cupertino real estate valuable, because people can move into a good school district instead of sending their kids to a private school.
But I found out how they do it. If you try to enroll a kid with bad language skills, say spanish is their primary language, the school district sends the kids to an "appropriate" school (which happens to be in neighboring sunnyvale)
>> the Pentagon’s schools for children of military members and civilian employees.
>> There will be few-to-no kids of poor single moms. All the kids will be well fed and groomed and socialized.
Have you looked at what US Army privates are actually paid? And I can tell you that there will be LOTS of single-parent households too. Lots of drug addicted parents/kids. The army isn't what it seen in the recruiting posters. it is a large community of young people with basically the same problems as any other group. There are some differences, parents are generally "employed", but there are also specific difficulties like absent mother/fathers and near-constant movements to new schools as young parents bounce between postings.
I used to take both public transport and a work shuttle. The difference was night and day. The filter of being able to hold a job eliminated all the problems you saw on the public transportation, excepting listening to music too loud.
This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in.
I grew up on military bases, and went to schools both on and off base for 18 years. All continental US bases typically have elementary-level (K-5) school, but you typically go to an off-base school for middle and high school. When you are overseas, this isn't the case, you would most likely go to school on base K-12.
I think the article gets right a lot of things, but as some other's mentioned there are also things it doesn't catch. There are still bad kids on base, who do tons of drugs, commit crimes, cheat, steal, whatever. These kids are in every population. One huge difference between on base schools and off, is if you got in trouble at school, your sponsor's (Mom/Dad whoever is the active duty in the family) CO (commanding officer) gets informed. This can lead to a tongue lashing at the least, and at the most your sponsor can get passed up on the next promotion list or demoted. Kids would get caught selling drugs, they would get suspended and then their Dad or Mom would usually make their life a living hell for a while. It would turn most kids around pretty quickly.
The worst one I know about first hand was a group of kids on base in California (a very remote base btw) had a little theft ring of the base exchange (BX, like target/walmart on base). The MP's found out about it, watched them work for a while, then arrested all of the kids. They were high schoolers, probably 15-17. I think 4 got caught. The result was each of their families were kicked off base, no longer able to live in free base housing. As stated elsewhere, military families aren't paid well at all, so now these families had to move off base and rent a house. Once again, this was a super remote base, and it was easily a 35 min drive from main base to the nearest housing off base. I will tell you the rest of our school suddenly got really well behaved for the rest of the year.
Once again, I think the NYT touched on most of the reasons schools were generally better, but to me discipline was a huge factor. You typically didn't have that one shithead in your class ruining it for everyone else.
Did you ever see any statistics to back up your perception that all the kids were extra well behaved for the rest of the year? The reason I ask is that we've all heard the whole "tough on crime" schtick and I feel like it has never really been proven out to be all that effective. especially on kids. plenty of kids receive penalties far more severe for the parents than having to move off base (like expulsion with no other schools around). And yet school discipline problems continue after each expulsion.
I mean, there weren't "statistics". We had a school of 300 kids and I could nearly name every one of them. After shit went down, everyone calmed the hell down. I don't know how to prove it or anything, but when people really needed to fight or something, they took it WAAAY off base.
> The result was each of their families were kicked off base, no longer able to live in free base housing. As stated elsewhere, military families aren't paid well at all, so now these families had to move off base and rent a house.
The service member generally receives a housing allowance if they live off base. I don't know if they receive it after being kicked out of base housing, though.
It's not a high bar to beat, at least here in New Jersey. Nearly all of our school boards are non-professional, non-compensated elected officials, and a large percentage of Superintendents started their career as gym teachers.
The net result is schools that hire hoards of consultants to try to meet professional standards, but fail anyway, while spending vast sums of tax payer dollars. Covid funds earmarked towards bridging the learning gap from closed schools during the pandemic are spent on fancy laptops, new athletic facilities, sound systems for auditoriums. Absenteeism is skyrocketing, and teachers are not only not encouraged to enforce discipline, they're actively told to let out of control students slide. Social promotion is on the rise, and standardized test scores are tanking.
We finally gave up in my local district and ended up paying a fortune to send both our kids to private schools. After an initial many-months-long struggle to catch up with their new private school classmates (because of the public school deficits), they are both doing much better. Money well spent, but I still send taxes to an ineffective district that spends money like water, and where educational value is dead last in their priorities.
They even introduced a course in Graphic Novels at the high school this year, while 75% of kids fail standardized science testing, and 60% fail in math.
It remains extremely strange to me that we have our school boards be largely totally non-professional laypeople in the US. Obviously there's no absolute requirement that you be a "professional" for almost any elected position in the US, but school boards are one of those situations, like judges and comptrollers, where it seems like there should be some basic qualifications for running. Especially because many of the folks elected to school boards are either 1) crazies with a bone to pick with a specific teacher/administrator/school or 2) moderately ambitious ladder climbers hoping to launch their political careers without having to work too hard.
New Jersey also has the system of Magnet schools at the county level, which have some of the best high schools in the country (high technology highschool, middlesex academy for math and science, union county magnet school, etc). They reasonably require tests and maintaining of discipline. Discipline is key to having effective schools, and if either students or parents are undermining it, schools can't be effective.
We are trying. It is very difficult though, the most effective people don’t want the job, and the Board pushes “feel good” politics on everyone, and they do the best they can to hide bad news (although sunshine laws thwarts that if you know how to dig and where to look).
Use of software like Board docks makes finding info 10x harder as well, what a steaming pile of crap that is.
If your kid is absent at a DoD school your CO will hound you. This makes a difference. There's also the slight difference that the military has socialized health care. When your kid is sick you take them to the doctor and that's that, while in civilian life small medical and especially dental issues go untreated and snowball into chronic absenteeism. Base life is really civilized in so many various ways. People violating the speed limit (20 MPH in housing areas) will be apprehended by armed MPs, so your kid can walk to school. Housing is often provided, even if it sucks, or subsidized, even if the allowance is below local market prices, so homelessness among active-duty families with children is practically nonexistent.
> There's also the slight difference that the military has socialized health care. When your kid is sick you take them to the doctor and that's that
Reminds me of a past vacation. Had a friend that was a pediatrician in the Army, based in Hawaii. We were all hanging out at the beach, and a kid cuts his hand on something. The friend walks over, says he's a doctor, asks if he can help out. The kid has a very apprehensive look on his face, so the friend smiles and says "I know, you're not sure I'm a doctor because I haven't asked your parents for their insurance"
DoD schools person here, a major point left out of this article is that if you do something bad enough in school your parent's CO will be notified and this can have real career results. In a foreign country you can get deported if you do something stupid enough to warrant it.
I went to several DoD and civilian schools, NC (dod), NJ (civ), Erie PA (civ), Okinawa (dod), NJ (civ). I would say the standards are higher in DoD, mostly because of standardized curriculum. In civilian world, the variance is very high. In South NJ things were more rigid, in Erie more lax.
As for "not having social groups" this can be a plus, looking at my civilian counterparts in high school. It has pluses and minuses, but being an outgroup in high school let me leave that stuff behind much easier on my way to college. It makes me an alien to most of civilian world, but many benefits.
Housing is provided in the military.
AMA. I am anecdotal, but I have seen both sides at all three levels split down the middle.
Edit: I definitely received an education way above my parents earning level, I am first to go to college in my family. I went to a very good engineering school.
Do you feel you faced any detrimental challenges your non-military family peers didn't, as you made the transition from high school to college? If so, what?
Have a child soon to be in a similar situation, so any thoughts helpful.
The major benefit/challenge of being a military kid that moved every 2-3y is that you make friends really fast and resocialize very easily. This also means you don't have any roots. My example is often that my friends in high school were friends since kindergarten, something I have no frame of reference for. It probably only hurt in high school for sports and clique based activities.
For going from highschool to college there is almost zero negative, since it's the nth time you've moved and had to rebuild a social structure.
Consider the number of total school changes for an average domestic student is 3. K-5, 6-8, 9-12, and in those cases they keep their friend groups.
Yeah, I had a similar upbringing, and this is my feeling as well. There's a massive trade-off here, but I do feel like the military kids I knew (and run into now) are radically more adaptable and sociable.
Another upside, in retrospect: you end up getting to see, up-close, a huge range of the social/cultural/political landscape.
It's hard to demonize an outgroup much when you at times were that outgroup -- or were at least, in the abstract, some outgroup. You end up forced to confront (deep-down, maybe mostly unconsciously) the arbitrariness and...malleability of a lot of things. You end up with a lot of tolerance. I'm thankful I had that experience, even if it was at times not particularly fun.
I spent Kindergarten to 4th grade on Hanscom A.F.B. near Lexington, MA. I didn't appreciate it at the time, but it hindsight it had lots going for it:
- No such thing as unemployment
- A strong community (Hanscom was also a small, walk-to-school) neighborhood
- The schools were indeed good (had several computers in the 2nd grade classroom in 1992).
There is a self-selecting element to it though; if you lose your job you're out of the community. The line between personal problems and professional problems---I came to find out later---is much blurrier than in the "real world". Also health care is crazy cheap.
I don't know if it could, or should, scale society wide. The social benefits are nice, but the authoritarian bent isn't.
The article suggests several causes:
1. Bias in population - these students all have families where at least one parent has a stable job, which isn't true elsewhere. There could also be other factors, for instance maybe people who enter the military are more motivated on average and that genetically or through parenting is passed on to their kids.
2. Better funding
3. Frequent feedback to teachers and more methodical planning
4. Excellent racial & socioeconomic integration
Is there a way to tease out the contribution in each area through controlling for variables. I suspect #1 is the largest by far, but I think this could be statistically controlled for partially by looking at children of parents who attend non-military schools. Curious for thoughts from HN.
No. #1 is your CO will chew your ass out in front of everyone (which is a big no-no in leadership, yet it's accepted regarding your children). I saw first hand my E6 got called to battalion CO to answer why his son was bullying other kids (I think some civilians from DoD). I still remember CO said, if you don't fix this, I march the whole damn battalion to your house and make you do push ups while your son watch.
This is also the best reason to NOT use stuff on base! The day I got pulled into my squadron commanders office because my dorm “was a mess” was the same day I applied for BAH.
I spent time in the US military many years ago. From my sample size of one:
1) This is population bias and self-selection. Everyone I met in the service was extremely patriotic and wanted to succeed in everything. Many came from desperately poor backgrounds and saw the service as their way to the middle class. Those who joined for other reasons were quickly forced out. At the time, when people asked me what my job was in the military, I joked that I was a "bullet stopper". I was joking but I honestly believed everyone in my team would take a bullet for each other.
2) Funding is questionable. Military pay is a joke. Many of the enlisted I knew received food stamps and WIC (women infant children supplement monies to feed themselves). The housing is old, probably contain asbestos and lead, mold etc. But at least its warm. Probably most important there was almost zero theft, burglaries, or crime you see in troubled cities. Healthcare is almost free.
3) Teaching. The military does things by the book. Many books. Thousands of pages. Most of which is bull shit. The military makes up for it through sheer determination.
4) Racial integration. Hmmmm. The US military at least has a huge problem with racism, sexism, all kinds of isms. Sexual assault is a taboo subject that happens under the surface and commanders at all levels are at their wit's end. If my daughter wanted to join the US military, I would actively encourage her and secretly worry that she would be sexually assaulted. I would try to warn her indirectly and tell her things like don't go to private parties. Drink only in a public setting with a designated person looking out for trouble. The service is an honor but also has its own problems.
Sexual assault is a taboo subject that happens under the surface and commanders at all levels are at their wit's end.
First, I assume that here, "sexual assault" is perpetrated by men against women. (Yes, I know there are other forms.)
In your opinion, what do you think is the root cause of this problem? And, is the rate of sexual assault higher for women in the military vs civilians? (I assume yes due to self-selection for more aggressive men.)
Females are overwhelmingly the victims. I don’t dare guess what the root cause is. I just know it was rarely reported. Over the years, it has actually gotten worse. So much so the DOD has taken away commanders disciplinary authority in this matter. I have no idea if the rates are higher or lower compared to the civilian population.
>3) Teaching. The military does things by the book. Many books. Thousands of pages. Most of which is bull shit. The military makes up for it through sheer determination.
>4) Racial integration. Hmmmm. The US military at least has a huge problem with racism, sexism, all kinds of isms.
There is something to be said for applying 3 to help fix 4 through, as you said, "sheer determination". Frank da Cruz, the creator of Columbia Kermit, tells in his autobiography online of how when he was in the Army in Germany in the 1960s he saw white sergeants lecturing soldiers in deep Southern accents on the evils of race prejudice.
All of those have multiplicative effects. Good home/parents make students more motivated, good teachers are able to work well with motivated students, capable classrooms are able to handle more demanding classes. I don't suspect socioeconomic integration matters here though if everyone is getting the same treatment. Standardization is also good when we see wildly different results in different classrooms. Harder to do in more fragmented and less well funded school districts.
But these are all well known factors. Not much to learn drom here, but it's nice to see it confirm the theory.
This. Mother and family spent careers in early childhood education.
- In order for learning to happen, kids have to be non-disruptive.
- In order for kids to be non-disruptive, they have to have their basic needs met: safety, food, stability, etc.
- In order for a kid's basic needs to be met, there has to be a source of income and time to care for them.
Absent that chain of dependencies, young children are in no state to learn anything, and distract the kids around them. And every minute of every week spent papering over deficiencies there is one less minute devoted to learning.
F.ex. in Title I schools, it's not uncommon to have families where the only book in the house might be one a child is sent home with.
If teachers received tabula rasa children, results would be much more even.
But they don't, which results in kids at bad schools being unable to focus, which means they don't learn basic material, which perpetuates income disparities later in life, which continues the cycle through lack of time and money.
The military has many bad aspects, but a parent with a steady job, housing, and benefits is a solid foundation for childhood academic success.
Yeah I have family in education too and it's a sad reality that schools just can't help most students because they come from broken homes. There are marginal improvements you can make like providing free lunch and good after school activities, but an actual solution would require other fundamental problems to be solved in society, or a radical reimagining of public education.
On a more nutty note, for the possible reforms I've heard of everything from public boarding schools so kid don't have to spend time in their bad home, to firing all teachers and paying children for testing well.
At the root, caring for and raising children well is an extremely time intensive endeavor.
It's hard to see a way we could fundamentally afford to pay someone to do it, at scale.
And the solutions that don't involve "someone" (at an extremely low child:caregiver ratio) don't seem like they'd produce success.
I do think schools should financially incentive performance, though! Not firing teachers, but just paying students directly for academic achievement -- make kids care.
I think these are good points, I am hugely in favor of expanding food stamps and child tax credits for this reason. One estimate is that every $1 spend on food stamps expands GDP by $1.50, so this is really good for the overall economy. I have heard of much higher estimates, but cannot easily find the source. We definitely need to help poor families break the poverty cycle. Schools should have free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and after school programs as well to deal with lack of food at home and 2 parents working full-time.
The parental bias is two-pronged - officers, many are college-educated, esp. from the various armed forces academies - West Point, Annapolis, et al., and those recruited into the armed forces have to overcome various hurdles, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/every-branch-us-milita...:
"The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007. "
So out of the possible Americans aged 17-24, less than 2.3% would serve in the military. The partner/spouse may not have to pass those hurdles, but having at least one parent with those attributes and employed would help the family wellbeing.
Probably an obsolete datapoint: My parents were both children of US military and educated domestically and internationally between 1955 - 1966. Although my mom became an accountant and dad was a mechanic, they were well-educated compared to the average American. They grew up in a time where college was for about 40% of high school graduates.
It's also obsolete but worth mentioning my grandfather, child of blue-collar people, still had to take Latin and French in a 1930's Stamford, Connecticut public school. Although he was a mechanic, electronics hobbyist, and home-improver, he owned Jeopardy almost to Ken Jennings'-level. He grew up in a time where not everyone went past 7th grade education (12.5 yrs old on average).
I think there are 4 positive traits of military culture that civilian culture doesn't appreciate:
What's unfortunate about the article is that it is so light on data, and heavy on assumptions. So whatever your agenda is, there is something to latch onto, but ultimately nothing to support it.
e.g. Prefer more rigour? "Defense officials attribute recent growth in test scores partly to the overhaul, which was meant to raise the level of rigor expected of students."
Prefer more money? "the Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states"
For all we can tell from the article, it is just self selection.
I spent the entirety of my elementary through high school life on a military base and schools on it.
1. On our base, school involvement was “easier” for the enlisted parent. They usually worked consistent hours and were available for after school involvement. They weren’t generally working late and night shifts allowing time to be involved with sports and other school activities.
2. Healthcare was provided and for regular services it was consistent and available. While we didn’t have to pay for it, we would often spend several hours at urgent care waiting to get seen when one of kids was not feeling well. It was a little strange that when I went to college, I had little understanding about how to go about seeing a doctor.
3. We had a small school which allowed everyone to know each other by name, even if we weren’t friends on day to day basis. We knew who was enlisted kids and who were officer kids and who were staff kids. This didn’t generally color attitudes, just part of who we were. It was a good community.
4. We had access to technology early and part of what led me to career in tech.
5. It was a very diverse environment of kids. It was just the way it was and I never gave any thought to race growing up.
6. We had a decent house on base (1950s brick) with each kid having their own room. If there was issues, like ceiling falling in on kitchen, base housing fixed the issues.
All of this took burdens off of my parents and us kids. I try to provide my kids with opportunities I had or even more than I had, but it certainly is a much different environment to do so.
The best school system I ever attended was a DOD-funded public school in rural Mississippi --- there were less than a dozen students from the local community, the balance were all from the Air Force Base.
Every teacher had at least a Master's Degree (pay was very good, and it was a very desirable school system to work at), and they had a system in place which firmly divided classes between academic and social --- for academic classes, one worked at one's ability level (up to four grades ahead until 8th grade when that was lifted), while social classes were at one's grade level. After 8th grade, one could begin taking college classes (some of the teachers were accredited as as faculty at a nearby college) --- if there wasn't a teacher available for a given class, then arrangements were made for a professor to come to the school, or for the student to travel to the college.
Many students would graduate high school and simultaneously receive a college degree.
The Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that the school was inherently unfair since it provided a notable benefit to students who studied hard and learned well without a corresponding benefit to those who would not do so.
Most very unfortunately, I have to reluctantly agree, but for reasons that are completely hidden: My CS program design teacher, would do three things: He would write the subjects he would cover on the board, and then cover them, and secondly he would check them off. When ever a question would come up from a past lecture, he would ask if someone else had the notes to answer the question, well. Guess who kept the best notes? I also ran the study hall after class. Aced all classes. I finally got up the nerve to ask him directly: "Where did you learn those three things?" "Oh! The Military." Turns out that those three exact things are used to 1) Write English essays, 2) Critique plays, 3) and organize client therapeutic meetings. etc. etc. etc. 4) organize code walk throughs and 5) multi team debugging sessions.
According to the article, the Dod educates 66k students. That's less than half the size of my county. Yet, the comparison is DoD vs states, not the more useful DoD vs counties (or some unit closer in size).
I'd love to see how DoD schools compare against top-notch school systems. And average school systems (in case the quality of country school districts isn't a bell curve for some reason).
The #1 public school in the US is Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). FCPS is a suburb of DC, and a fantastic amount of the kids there are children of military servicemembers and FedGov civilians.
A lot of those well paid contractors are former military as well.
Yeah, this is along the lines of my comment. (Am a military brat, attended some DoD schools, also attended a school in FCPS.)
The educational rigor across different districts is massive. Many military kids get to sample from it a lot of times (possibly even with a bias for FCPS in particular!); other kids get to sample it ~once. There is probably some huge reversion to the mean at play here.
Yup. I grew up and live in Fairfax County. The wealthy DC suburbs have schools that are so far better than the rest of the states (MD and VA). The massive differences between systems makes a state-level comparison far less useful.
My feeling is that school performance is denominated by the students and parents.
If for example, you took the best performing school district and the worst performing school district and swapped just the parents and students keeping the school staff, administration, and facilities the same, the previously best school district would end up near the bottom and the previously worst school district would end up near the top.
I went to school at Fort Gordon for two years, and the impression I got was that if I got in trouble, my parents got in trouble, and that would have been way worse. In public schools however, it never crossed my mind that my parents could get in trouble for something I did in school.
With the military schools, there is a huge element of parental responsibility and that's why I think it made them great.
Public school teacher here. Public schools have been in a downward slide for decades. If you want to know what's wrong, just brace yourself and ask a teacher. Alas, many people want to believe it's the teachers' fault, and so rarely bother to ask the teachers. Or, failing that, people think it's just that teachers aren't paid enough and think more money will fix the problems (more money would be nice, but that's not the problem).
It's very straightforward to fix public schools, but, in my view:
* few people actually want to know what the problems are,
* only a fraction of those people will speak up and say something about addressing the problems, and
* only a small fraction of those people would have the wherewithal to actually push for the solutions to be implemented.
Fact is, good teachers are constantly being driven out of the profession. It's just too arduous and heartbreaking, and every year it gets worse.
Sorry. I typed out a reply, but it's like 5 pages. There's a lot wrong. Here's something extremely boiled down:
Too many administrators. Students having their phones in school. Out of control administrators who waste teachers' time. Students roaming halls. Phones. No consequences for skipping class, roaming halls, or cheating (administrators not enforcing discipline). Administrators desperate to get everyone to pass and graduate. Phones. Administrators pressuring teachers to pass students. No dress code. Endless accommodations for students. Endless meetings soaking up valuable teacher time. Administrators disallowing midterms and finals because that would cause too many students to fail their classes (now, many teachers are required to have projects and presentations, or similar as midterms and as finals). Valuable instruction time lost due to standardized testing. Rampant cheating. Zero consequences for students' behavior (extremely rare to see an out-of-school suspension, and expulsion is unheard of these days). Block scheduling (4 long periods per day) because students won't do homework (or will just cheat/copy/paste). Administrators constantly pushing group work, projects, posters (rather than real focused work).
> “The military isn’t perfect — there is still racism in the military,” said Leslie Hinkson, a former Georgetown University sociologist who studied integration in Defense Department schools. But what is distinctive, she said, “is this access to resources in a way that isn’t racialized.”
Racism in the military is a career ender for officers and enlisted kind of like getting a DUI but worse. What is more in the system is a "good ole buddy system", where high performers often do favors for each other across racial, preference, and gender lines.
My parents both taught in California and I've been friends with many from DoDEA and here is a TLDR;
Please hold the downvoting for political reasons
-Engaged parents, most are NCOs, officers and civil servants
-Well Funded, like, $1M+ housing area school districts
-Low ratios of teachers to students
-All students are US citizens or foreign nationals from partner nations
-Great teachers, some overseas location have insane competition for teacher slots, some professors jump to DoDEA slots
-bilingual students that are smart seems the norm
-no problems with illegal aliens, or ESL brand new to English swamping 20% of the class particularly at higher grades like what happens in some parts of CA
-Some locations have DoDEA are the very choicest in the US military, so they attract the creme de la creme of overachievers competing for very limited slots
I'd describe the DoDEA schools as similar to the very best public schools in the US, but you can find other government schools that run similar programs to DoDEA
I’m not mentioning military selectivity because it is highly variable based on the strength of the US economy.
In the Army for example, the highest ASVAB averages are held by infantry & special forces (which is ironic given the low ASVAB requirements for infantry). Many people join the infantry for 4 years only, as a part of a “See action, travel, shoot guns” post highschool before college mindset.
How the results are measured? I imagine teachers acting as drill sergeants, perfect discipline in the class and children who forgot their homework doing push ups. The results of standardized tests such as PISA can be pretty high this way. But how many high achieving creatives, scientists, disruptors come out of these schools?
An important thing to take from this is that if you pay your teachers well, and also make sure that all the kids in school have a house (since military folk get housing for their families), and at least one parent is paid well, then the kids do well (and don’t write run on sentences like me).
Military recruits typically are of the top 50% of IQ via the AFQT test, so the lower half is truncated, and IQ is largely hereditary, so children's scores reflect parent's scores. This could explain some of it.
Here, you have kids whose parents are employed (that is, not on welfare, can do their job) and the kids are strongly motivated to do well in school so they don’t have to join the military, like their parents did.
I grew up on military installations and attended some DoD schools. Some things unmentioned/underemphasized:
Families PCS (move) extremely often -- sometimes every school year, frequently every few years. Some places have DoD schools "on base", some do not, with students instead attend the local public schools. Some of those public schools are majority military kids, some are not.
DoD schools may have a consistent curriculum (not sure), but public schools across states/countries certainly do not. Constant moves mean students get a fractured, redundant curriculum. (Comically, I recall learning about the "Explorer" in History class no less than three times.)
Some bases are located in well-off areas with great public education, many others are not. Students might find themselves one year learning algebra, the next back to basic multiplication. Schools tend to be stubbornly inflexible and will not make accommodations on their own. Extremely attentive and pushy parents may get weak accommodations (e.g., letting students moving full grade levels up/down; something difficult to explain later), but it's rare.
Added to this is impact of constant social upheaval + stress of parents deployment, lack of lasting friendships, etc.
This is all to say -- you would not expect this population of kids to do well academically! The fact that they seem to (as measured in these tests at DoD schools) should be really surprising, and probably has little to do with the DoD schools themselves. They're after all only responsible for part (often a small part) of these kids' education.
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My main guesses at the real drivers here are:
1. (As mentioned in the article) It's a different world on base. Parents have a massive stake in their children's behavior -- and the students know this. No one wants their parent to get an earful from their CO, and it does happen. (This is most pronounced at DoD schools, but also extends off base.)
Drug and alcohol use is exceedingly rare, due to the above + how serious an offense it is on base.
It's true also that there's a modest baseline of economic + social support. Maybe not as much as the article suggests, but it's not nothing.
2. Simple reversion to the mean. The DoD schools are full of kids with a really diverse set of educational experience. Maybe some of the good experiences are even a bit "sticky" -- habits and skill learned transferring over to new environments, maybe even bad ones. Maybe it's not surprising that that population wins vs. the baseline (where kids only get a homogenous, mostly-good or mostly-bad experience).
- If the good skills and habits are "contagious", maybe DoD schools even help spread them across this population.
3. The tests are mostly measuring the lower portion of the distribution. Well-off schools will have most students clipping the top end of the measurement. Many DoD students attend those schools! (At least for a time.)
This is going to seriously amplify (2), but also (1) and other things to the extent that they improve (or remove from the sample) the worst-off students.
The DoD is progressive in more than one way: unlike much of the rest of the country they also started desegregating during the 1948-1954 time period...
that's great, although the article doesn't spill much information other than saying they're insulated from bureaucratic institutions (a pretty good start)
i don't see beating public school performance as a high bar, public schools are terrible
acton academy is the gold standard imo, i love hearing about other education paradigms though.
clickbait headline, the real answer is in the article:
> For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.
>"Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students
Providing a stable home environment with access to at least one parent, proper nutrition, and safety - all commonly missing in the worst performing school districts.
That may be a bit simplistic since the article does mentions other possible explanations for the better results beyond the fact that essentially all students are above an economic floor.
And I didn't get it from the article, but are those schools better than the schools in wealthy districts?
Ad hominem. He's making a simple claim about the world that is easily verifiable. This site has information about the testing requirements and current cutoff. [1]
my grad school linguistics professor, an internationally recognized scholar across several languages, credited the DoD Language school at Monterrey CA as having been just amazing, and who went back to teach for decades in a top five ranked US university, not only linguists but engineering kids like me.
He was the same age as my dad so had the avuncular thing going, was personable, but most of all inspiring to decades of students to look outside their curricula.
Sometimes what sounds like up a creek turns out to be an unpredictable kick ass river, I guess.
The NYT is an apparatus of the intelligence agencies, and coincidentally military recruitment is down ... this is subliminal advertisement for recruitment. Coupled with war in Ukraine and incoming war in the Middle east, in addition to new recruiting tactics (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/10/03/army-unveils-...), expect to see alot more praise of the DoD/Military in MSM outlets like the NYT.
When I think of 18 kids looking at their options in life and weighing how tf they're going to pay for college and is considering the military, I'm not imagining someone who casually reads the New York Times.
