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The Lottery a documentary on NY charter schools.

CommunistCowCommunistCow Abstract MetalThingyRegistered User regular
edited June 2010 in Debate and/or Discourse
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242123324855474.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
wsj wrote:
So is propagating myths about Harlem Success—that it only succeeds because it has smaller class sizes; or that its children's test scores are so high because it gets more money. The truth is that the school gets superior results with the same or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil. In 2009, 95% of third-graders at Harlem Success passed the state's English Language Arts exam. Only 51% of third graders in P.S. 149, the traditional public school that shares the same building, did. That same year, Harlem Success was No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.
....
"The [United Federation of Teachers] (UFT) was exposed at this particular City Council hearing," she says, "because they were caught giving out scripted cue cards with specific questions for City Council members to ask charter representatives in the city." Unlike many of the politicians, who came and went from the chamber during the seven-hour hearing, Ms. Sackler remained. And she watched as the scripted questions were repeated and repeated and repeated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khlm4fa-_cE

So I was kind of curious as to why this charter school doing better with similar class sizes and slightly less money than other schools. Is it because all of the students attend want to be there? Do they just have better teachers? Also why is the teachers union fighting this tooth and nail? Are they just trying to protect their government funding from going to more charter schools?

Personally I would love to see this movie but from the WSJ article it seems like it would be nice if the UFT actually responded to her interview requests for the documentary. Then again that just might be some false equivalency.

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Posts

  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I'm left wondering if the director ever heard of the concept of selection bias.

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  • CouscousCouscous Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Don't these schools generally have much more parental involvement due to it being required?

    Couscous on
  • LoklarLoklar Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242123324855474.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
    wsj wrote:
    So is propagating myths about Harlem Success—that it only succeeds because it has smaller class sizes; or that its children's test scores are so high because it gets more money. The truth is that the school gets superior results with the same or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil. In 2009, 95% of third-graders at Harlem Success passed the state's English Language Arts exam. Only 51% of third graders in P.S. 149, the traditional public school that shares the same building, did. That same year, Harlem Success was No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.
    ....
    "The [United Federation of Teachers] (UFT) was exposed at this particular City Council hearing," she says, "because they were caught giving out scripted cue cards with specific questions for City Council members to ask charter representatives in the city." Unlike many of the politicians, who came and went from the chamber during the seven-hour hearing, Ms. Sackler remained. And she watched as the scripted questions were repeated and repeated and repeated.
    *snip*
    So I was kind of curious as to why this charter school doing better with similar class sizes and slightly less money than other schools. Is it because all of the students attend want to be there? Do they just have better teachers? Also why is the teachers union fighting this tooth and nail? Are they just trying to protect their government funding from going to more charter schools?

    Personally I would love to see this movie but from the WSJ article it seems like it would be nice if the UFT actually responded to her interview requests for the documentary. Then again that just might be some false equivalency.

    I think it has to do with choice. People are shoe-horned into a standard public education system that may not fit their needs. But it's paid for through tax-money so everyone gets a "one size fits all" kind of education. And I'll bet the people who designed that education tend to be wealthier and whiter. So it shouldn't be a surprise that it doesn't quite fit a poorer, non-white child/community.

    So why don't we just have more charter schools? Government rules, union power. Unions only interest is in protecting union member's jobs, wages and working conditions. But a charter school presents competition to the public school, so the government is lobbied as hard as possible to limit the number of charters. If there were enough charter schools in New York, people might leave the public schools. If enough people leave the public schools, there won't be such a need for public school teachers and the union doesn't want that.

    There is an artificial limit on the number of kids who can go to that school. In a free market, the cost of something rises (profits rise) until a balance is found between the number of spots available and the number of people willing to pay that price. Obviously a charter school where "hundreds of thousands" of kids are competing for 500 spots/year would cost a hell of a lot of money. But it would also encourage a hell of a lot of other charter schools to spring up.

    Those other schools that want to spring up are stopped in some way. I'm not sure how but it's obvious that that is what's happening.

    Edit: I'm not against unions. But the government shouldn't bend to their demands.

    Loklar on
  • ElJeffeElJeffe Moderator, ClubPA mod
    edited June 2010
    In California, charter schools are all government funded, and so they're just as free as public schools. I'm not sure of thew details of how this all works out, or what the effective difference is between a charter and a public school in CA, but there you go. My daughter goes to a charter (also a Montessori) school, and it's pretty awesome, though I don't know if its awesomeness stems from it being charter, being Montessori, or just being run by good people.

    Parents are required to volunteer 40 hours of time per year per student, though, and I'm guessing that's a big factor. Sitting in her classroom helping the kids or just doing grunt work (cutting things out, sorting papers, etc) is hugely informative and makes it hard to not be involved or aware. (It's also a lot of fun.)

    ElJeffe on
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  • SaammielSaammiel Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Selection bias doesn't explain the antics of the UFT anyhow.

    Saammiel on
  • YallYall Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242123324855474.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
    wsj wrote:
    So is propagating myths about Harlem Success—that it only succeeds because it has smaller class sizes; or that its children's test scores are so high because it gets more money. The truth is that the school gets superior results with the same or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil. In 2009, 95% of third-graders at Harlem Success passed the state's English Language Arts exam. Only 51% of third graders in P.S. 149, the traditional public school that shares the same building, did. That same year, Harlem Success was No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.
    ....
    "The [United Federation of Teachers] (UFT) was exposed at this particular City Council hearing," she says, "because they were caught giving out scripted cue cards with specific questions for City Council members to ask charter representatives in the city." Unlike many of the politicians, who came and went from the chamber during the seven-hour hearing, Ms. Sackler remained. And she watched as the scripted questions were repeated and repeated and repeated.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khlm4fa-_cE

    So I was kind of curious as to why this charter school doing better with similar class sizes and slightly less money than other schools. Is it because all of the students attend want to be there? Do they just have better teachers? Also why is the teachers union fighting this tooth and nail? Are they just trying to protect their government funding from going to more charter schools?

    Personally I would love to see this movie but from the WSJ article it seems like it would be nice if the UFT actually responded to her interview requests for the documentary. Then again that just might be some false equivalency.

    Because NYSUT is mostly a bunch of greedy aholes (or I should say it's run by a bunch of greedy aholes). Goes for most of the state employee unions in NY actually.

    Yall on
  • CouscousCouscous Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I don't have any problem with charter schools.

    Most of the studies show a difference between the schools but usually not a huge difference though it varies greatly from charter school to charter school. Granted, most of the studies aren't very good.
    The most authoritative study of charter schools was conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University in 2009. The report is the first detailed national assessment of charter schools. It analyzed 70% of the nation's students attending charter schools and compared the academic progress of those students with that of demographically matched students in nearby public schools. The report found that 17% of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools; 46% showed no difference from public schools; and 37% were significantly worse than their traditional public school counterparts. The authors of the report considering this a "sobering" finding about the quality of charter schools in the U.S. Charter schools showed a significantly greater variation in quality as compared with the more standardized public schools with many falling below public school performances and a few exceeding them significantly. Results vary for various demographics with Black and Hispanic children not doing as well as they would in public schools, but with children from poverty backgrounds, students learning English, and brighter students doing better; average students do poorer. While the obvious solution to the widely varying quality of charter schools would be to close those who perform below the level of public schools, this is hard to accomplish in practice as even a poor school has its supporters.[54]

    Couscous on
  • geckahngeckahn Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I did foreign exchange in sweden for a year back before college. Basically all of their high schools are charters - my city had like 30 different high schools, and ranged from the big general education ones to smaller oens focused on art and drama etc.

    Definitely way better then what we do here. My school was fantastic. We ran on a college type schedule for classes, which was awesome for sleeping in because some days I wouldnt need to be at school till like 10:30, and lots of very high quality learning went on.

    geckahn on
  • Casual EddyCasual Eddy The Astral PlaneRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    IF this is the same thing as the harlem children's zone it tracks children from 0-18, providing parenting classes (read to your kid every night from 0-6, no corporal punishment, home is safe encouraging place) and afterschool programs.

    essentially our education system hopes to 'fix' broken kids once they enter first grade which is not feasible. this program could fix the education crisis quite easily, but the education system is extremely entrenched and about as easy to change as the tides

    Casual Eddy on
  • tbloxhamtbloxham Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704635204575242123324855474.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
    wsj wrote:
    So is propagating myths about Harlem Success—that it only succeeds because it has smaller class sizes; or that its children's test scores are so high because it gets more money. The truth is that the school gets superior results with the same or slightly bigger class sizes and less state money per pupil. In 2009, 95% of third-graders at Harlem Success passed the state's English Language Arts exam. Only 51% of third graders in P.S. 149, the traditional public school that shares the same building, did. That same year, Harlem Success was No. 1 in math out of 3,500 public schools in New York State.
    ....
    "The [United Federation of Teachers] (UFT) was exposed at this particular City Council hearing," she says, "because they were caught giving out scripted cue cards with specific questions for City Council members to ask charter representatives in the city." Unlike many of the politicians, who came and went from the chamber during the seven-hour hearing, Ms. Sackler remained. And she watched as the scripted questions were repeated and repeated and repeated.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Khlm4fa-_cE

    So I was kind of curious as to why this charter school doing better with similar class sizes and slightly less money than other schools. Is it because all of the students attend want to be there? Do they just have better teachers? Also why is the teachers union fighting this tooth and nail? Are they just trying to protect their government funding from going to more charter schools?

    Personally I would love to see this movie but from the WSJ article it seems like it would be nice if the UFT actually responded to her interview requests for the documentary. Then again that just might be some false equivalency.

    1) The kids want to be there
    2) The parents have to really be involved to get their kids there and keep their kids there
    3) The kids have to travel to get there, making them less likely to just leave during class since they likely don't know the neighbourhood

    This may not be true of all children, but it is true of enough that bad behaviour cannot percolate and overwhelm the class. It only takes a small decrease in the number of 'bad kids' for the well behaved children to be dominant again and for poor behaviour to result in exclusion and marginalization, conversely a small increase is the difference between a school struggling with discipline and a drug addled war zone. It's all about reinforcement and teacher stress, in a good school the kids help with discipline, in a bad school there is no time left to do anything but discipline students.

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  • geckahngeckahn Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    also public unions fucking suck.

    geckahn on
  • AngelHedgieAngelHedgie Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?

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  • geckahngeckahn Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?

    Their ability to gain significant benefits at no gain and quite a bit of cost to the taxpayer is quite impressive.

    see: police unions, federal employee unions, teacher unions, etc.

    So what you end up with is huge pensions, a low bar for retirement, and unmotivated workers. I'm a defense contractor with the DoD and I work with federal employees all the time. They largely suck to work with.

    geckahn on
  • ElJeffeElJeffe Moderator, ClubPA mod
    edited June 2010
    tbloxham wrote: »
    It's all about reinforcement and teacher stress, in a good school the kids help with discipline, in a bad school there is no time left to do anything but discipline students.

    Yeah, Maddie's class is good about letting peer pressure and social reinforcement contribute to discipline. Kids volunteer for tasks, and then get to pick "quiet friends" to help them out; the class gets or loses marbles that can be traded in for fun stuff based on whether anyone is talking or acting up during lessons. There are still a non-zero number of fuckos in there who I would like to punch, but the really distracting ones get removed from the group before they have a chance to impede anyone's learning. My experience with kindergarteners and first graders is pretty minimal, but it seems like a good set-up.

    ElJeffe on
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  • surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    In general unions can be huge obstructionist dicks. In England they've also been great at ensuring nepotism and sexism in the workplace :/

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  • Psycho Internet HawkPsycho Internet Hawk Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Application for a charter school typically requires at least some involvement on the part of the parent, and the most underperforming students are almost always those with the least engaged parents and thus unlikely to end up at a charter. So there's sort of an innate selection bias there.

    Also, the UFT's seniority rules are retarded, and force schools to fire new teachers in order to keep older ones, regardless of performance. It is almost impossible to fire an older teacher simply for being a crappy teacher, unless they touch a child or something, but if you're young, it's really hard to keep your job if budgets are cut. So a lot of new/young talent goes to charter schools.

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  • Modern ManModern Man Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?
    Especially when it comes to white collar unions, like teachers' unions, they only serve to keep their constitutents from being fired while creating little, or no, benefits to the people they're supposed to be serving, or the public at large.

    For the teachers' unions, providing a quality education to students is a distant, distant second priority to making sure teachers can't be fired and extracting as much money as possible from taxpayers. As an example, I read a story a while back about how NYC public schools one year only fired 3 teachers out of 30,000.

    Here in DC, the teachers' union just agreed to a new contract that will hopefully change the way schools operate in the District.

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  • enc0reenc0re Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    School choice is good.

    And that's a whole different point from government-run ("public schools"), government-funded ("charter schools"), or privately-/run/funded ("private schools").

    enc0re on
  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Modern Man wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?
    Especially when it comes to white collar unions, like teachers' unions, they only serve to keep their constitutents from being fired while creating little, or no, benefits to the people they're supposed to be serving, or the public at large.

    For the teachers' unions, providing a quality education to students is a distant, distant second priority to making sure teachers can't be fired and extracting as much money as possible from taxpayers. As an example, I read a story a while back about how NYC public schools one year only fired 3 teachers out of 30,000.

    Here in DC, the teachers' union just agreed to a new contract that will hopefully change the way schools operate in the District.

    One of the other problems is that it's a public good that is forced on people between 5 and 16 with little opt out ability for people in the worst situations.

    As for NYC firing teachers, there was a "This American Life" that did a story about how bad teachers are sent to pasture in some random building where they don't do anything all day.

    mrt144 on
  • ChanusChanus Harbinger of the Spicy Rooster Apocalypse The Flames of a Thousand Collapsed StarsRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    So, what we're to glean from this is that parental involvement tends to result in better performance?


    NOWAI

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  • SaammielSaammiel Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I don't really get the concerns about selection bias anyhow. OK, parents self-sort into charter schools and public schools based on their desire to be active. How is that bad? It allows charter schools to thrive and it also allows you to specifically tailor the curriculum and level of support in public schools to aid students that have little parental involvement. I mean, every other arena would kill for customers that would sef-sort themselves into different categories so that products can be tailored to their needs/desires. But somehow in primary and secondary education that is bad?

    Saammiel on
  • enc0reenc0re Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    The argument is that it makes Charter Schools look unfairly good. Of course, anyone who's lived in Sweden knows that they are good, period.

    Not that it's ever fair to compare ourselves to a Nordic country.

    enc0re on
  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    enc0re wrote: »
    The argument is that it makes Charter Schools look unfairly good. Of course, anyone who's lived in Sweden knows that they are good, period.

    Not that it's ever fair to compare ourselves to a Nordic country.

    Yeah, they lose hands down when it comes to food. Seriously, Scandinavian food is garbage.

    mrt144 on
  • RedTideRedTide Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    geckahn wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?

    Their ability to gain significant benefits at no gain and quite a bit of cost to the taxpayer is quite impressive.

    see: police unions, federal employee unions, teacher unions, etc.

    So what you end up with is huge pensions, a low bar for retirement, and unmotivated workers. I'm a defense contractor with the DoD and I work with federal employees all the time. They largely suck to work with.

    Union membership is far from a magic shield that keeps an employee from being canned for gross negligence or incompetence. Binding arbitration (the last resort to a union contract dispute) is typically avoidable if the administration in question behaves in a sound manner during negotiations and both sides make reasonable demands of the other.

    It also will seldom give an unfair reward (most decisions look at other locals and award based on the going rate plus cost of living, etc.) and typically big awards are only given when a local is out of step.

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  • geckahngeckahn Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    RedTide wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?

    Their ability to gain significant benefits at no gain and quite a bit of cost to the taxpayer is quite impressive.

    see: police unions, federal employee unions, teacher unions, etc.

    So what you end up with is huge pensions, a low bar for retirement, and unmotivated workers. I'm a defense contractor with the DoD and I work with federal employees all the time. They largely suck to work with.

    Union membership is far from a magic shield that keeps an employee from being canned for gross negligence or incompetence. Binding arbitration (the last resort to a union contract dispute) is typically avoidable if the administration in question behaves in a sound manner during negotiations and both sides make reasonable demands of the other.

    It also will seldom give an unfair reward (most decisions look at other locals and award based on the going rate plus cost of living, etc.) and typically big awards are only given when a local is out of step.

    dude. I'm talking about public unions. Not private ones. Lets not confuse the issue.

    You know how the department of defense gets rids of employees it no longer wants or needs? The usual step is to wait it out until retirement and then just not hire anyone else. The more drastic measure is to offer them an extremely unappealing position in say, Alaska, so they decline it and leave.

    Pretty much nobody ever gets fired. You would have to fuck up reallllly bad to merit that. People near retirement will read newspapers during meetings that theyre supposed to be paying attention at, and then get up and leave before its over. and nobody gives a fuck.

    Meanwhile, to actually get anything done, the government needs to hire extremely expensive contractors to actually do the work.

    geckahn on
  • tbloxhamtbloxham Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Saammiel wrote: »
    I don't really get the concerns about selection bias anyhow. OK, parents self-sort into charter schools and public schools based on their desire to be active. How is that bad? It allows charter schools to thrive and it also allows you to specifically tailor the curriculum and level of support in public schools to aid students that have little parental involvement. I mean, every other arena would kill for customers that would sef-sort themselves into different categories so that products can be tailored to their needs/desires. But somehow in primary and secondary education that is bad?

    The objection is that this happens.....

    There is an 'OK' school with 100 students per year group and 4 teachers for that year group.

    25 behave well and want to learn
    50 are OK
    25 behave poorly and will be disruptive.

    20 sets of parents are active helping teachers.

    A charter school opens, taking 25 pupils in a year group and demanding a high level of parent interaction and taking 1 teacher. The best students move to it, now at our old school we have....

    3 Teachers

    5 well behaved children
    45 are OK
    25 behave poorly

    4 sets of parents are actively helping teachers.

    Now, rather than the OK children being pulled equally in both directions, positive and negative by the children at the extremes there are far more negative influences. There are also fewer parents helping. This creates a self reinforcing problem where discipline degrades, there are now more discipline problems, and less manpower to solve the problems.

    So, by creating the charter school we have gone from a situation where our 4 teachers provided an OK experience to 50 children, a good experience to 25 and a bad experience to 25 to once where 75 children get a bad experience, and 25 children get an exceptional one. It's really a problem of manpower and influence.

    tbloxham on
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  • MalkorMalkor Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Modern Man wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?
    Especially when it comes to white collar unions, like teachers' unions, they only serve to keep their constitutents from being fired while creating little, or no, benefits to the people they're supposed to be serving, or the public at large.

    For the teachers' unions, providing a quality education to students is a distant, distant second priority to making sure teachers can't be fired and extracting as much money as possible from taxpayers. As an example, I read a story a while back about how NYC public schools one year only fired 3 teachers out of 30,000.

    Here in DC, the teachers' union just agreed to a new contract that will hopefully change the way schools operate in the District.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7O7C25U73w

    Perfect segue!
    The NYC school system has problems that schools like the one in the Lottery can't address.

    Malkor on
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  • Mr. PovondraMr. Povondra Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    God I fucking wish that the teachers' unions had half the power that their detractors give to them. Maybe then governments wouldn't be cutting education funding like it was the hip thing to do. Unfortunately that is not the case, and the lazy fucking self-interested teachers in my area now have to deal with over 220 students per day. But obviously it's their fault if they can't deal with that.

    Mr. Povondra on
  • mrt144mrt144 King of the Numbernames Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    mrt144 on
  • CommunistCowCommunistCow Abstract Metal ThingyRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    tbloxham wrote: »
    This may not be true of all children, but it is true of enough that bad behaviour cannot percolate and overwhelm the class. It only takes a small decrease in the number of 'bad kids' for the well behaved children to be dominant again and for poor behaviour to result in exclusion and marginalization, conversely a small increase is the difference between a school struggling with discipline and a drug addled war zone.

    Go go gadget anecdote:
    My fiance's mother teaches 7th grade english and from what I can tell even 1 or 2 bad kids in her class of 25 can be rather disruptive.

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  • TehSlothTehSloth Hit Or Miss I Guess They Never Miss, HuhRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I remember I moved to a "Fundamental" school after 2nd grade which was probably actually a Charter school but I wasn't familiar with the terminology at the time. I don't really remember the first elementary school I went to that well, but I went to magnet middle and high schools, where the difference between the classes with magnet students and non-magnet students were really night and day. For some reason, they decided that in order to prevent schools from being complete failures, they would set up little mini-schools inside of them and bus in high-achieving students throughout the county to balance the otherwise poor performing population. It was so bad that even our teachers would quip about how we had to do well on our standardized tests so that we could average the rest of the school out to a C. By the way putting letter grades on schools based on standardized test performance is dumb. We were almost completely segregated from the rest of the school, it was kinda sad to be honest.

    As far as unions go, I probably should know more about them since my mom is an elementary school teacher, all I really get from her is that the administration is incompetent, the politics are BS, and it's virtually impossible to take care of the kids that really need serious help.

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  • ElJeffeElJeffe Moderator, ClubPA mod
    edited June 2010
    Our schools really do get too much money, only in the sense that we shell out way too much for what we get. As other nations indicate, we could be getting more quality for less money.

    Except the only two policy responses we ever get regarding this point are:

    A) Our schools are underperforming, so let's give them more money, or
    B) Our schools are too expensive, so let's give them less money.

    There never seems to be a:

    C) Our schools are clearly doing something terribly wrong, so let's implement a top-down analysis and try to fix whatever systemic problems exist.

    Because that sort of approach requires more than a single election cycle, and problems requiring more time than that are politically unappealing.

    As far as quick-and-dirty approaches go, it seems the best correlation to good students is active parenting. Maybe some sort of mandatory volunteering across all schools everywhere? Even, like, 10 hours per year would be helpful, just to get the parents in the classroom. To address the fact that this requirement would adversely affect the poor, maybe we could implement legislation to require employers to grant time off for volunteering, and provide limited subsidies for parents below the poverty line to reimburse them for time lost, or something?

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  • ElJeffeElJeffe Moderator, ClubPA mod
    edited June 2010
    tbloxham wrote: »
    This may not be true of all children, but it is true of enough that bad behaviour cannot percolate and overwhelm the class. It only takes a small decrease in the number of 'bad kids' for the well behaved children to be dominant again and for poor behaviour to result in exclusion and marginalization, conversely a small increase is the difference between a school struggling with discipline and a drug addled war zone.

    Go go gadget anecdote:
    My fiance's mother teaches 7th grade english and from what I can tell even 1 or 2 bad kids in her class of 25 can be rather disruptive.

    Which is why kids who are acting up to the point of being disruptive should be removed from the room ASAP. Yes, constantly removing the same few kids from class will probably screw up their education, but at least it doesn't screw up the other 23.

    ElJeffe on
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  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I'm going to link to this thread the next time someone complains PA is a liberal echo chamber.

    Anyway.
    So I was kind of curious as to why this charter school doing better with similar class sizes and slightly less money than other schools. Is it because all of the students attend want to be there? Do they just have better teachers? Also why is the teachers union fighting this tooth and nail? Are they just trying to protect their government funding from going to more charter schools?

    I can give you the typical union answers (which I don't all agree with, but I'm aware of them) - unions charge that:
    • charter schools skim the students who are easiest to teach through a vast array of underhanded methods (entrance exams, encouraging poorer students to leave, discouraging them from applying, etc.),
    • that charter schools skim the teachers by letting public schools invest in training the newbies, then hiring away the best once they've taught for a few years and their quality becomes known,
    • that charter schools are not more easily held accountable in return for greater autonomy from the taxpayers that fund their operation,
    • that the accountability methods we do have like exams or student evaluations are all inherently flawed and reward teaching the test or other destructive practices,
    • and that the greatest factor contributing to student success or failure is family support rather than school reform and of course the families who fight for their children to enter charter schools have more motivated parents.

    To be honest all of this is slightly foreign to me because I'm not sure I would agree with the basic concept of equally funding every student, or expecting schools to take their "fair share" of special-needs students; it seems more efficient to create designated-purpose schools.

    The (national) school system I grew up with operated along these lines; I was the worst performing student in class and easily in the worst 1% of the school but I didn't mind because I had classmates who could beat university teams in international science olympiads, or contribute to published academic papers at fifteen years old, or take eight A-levels whilst on the regional sports team because why not and still kick my ass in Warcraft III or any of the games we played illicitly on the school network. There were worse people to be academically inferior to.

    Likewise I'm not entirely certain I would know how to overcome basic cultural problems like a lack of cultural approval of educational attainment and knowledge, since this is something I was wholly surrounded with at home and at school.

    ronya on
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  • CauldCauld Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    I read a Time Magazine article about the head of that charter school. It has longer school days, a shorter summer break, they study on Saturdays preparing for standardized tests, etc. There is a parent-school contract type thing that stipulates a certain amount of parental involvement as well.

    Also they apparently try pretty hard to kick out problem kids and things like that. The article was largely about the woman who's in charge of the whole thing, but also touched on some of statistics, etc. I tried to google it but couldn't find it, it was from earlier this year.

    One thing that stood out was the comparison to the zero-tolerance Gulianni style stuff. I guess she makes a big deal out of having the building be absolutely spotless, student's uniforms must be perfect and clean, and all that kind of stuff. The idea being to minimize distractions and to make the school the best environment possible for learning.

    Cauld on
  • RedTideRedTide Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    ronya wrote: »
    I can give you the typical union answers (which I don't all agree with, but I'm aware of them) - unions charge that:
    • charter schools skim the students who are easiest to teach through a vast array of underhanded methods (entrance exams, encouraging poorer students to leave, discouraging them from applying, etc.),
    • that charter schools skim the teachers by letting public schools invest in training the newbies, then hiring away the best once they've taught for a few years and their quality becomes known,
    • that charter schools are not more easily held accountable in return for greater autonomy from the taxpayers that fund their operation,
    • that the accountability methods we do have like exams or student evaluations are all inherently flawed and reward teaching the test or other destructive practices,
    • and that the greatest factor contributing to student success or failure is family support rather than school reform and of course the families who fight for their children to enter charter schools have more motivated parents.

    My best friend is a teacher in a Jersey City Jr. High School. My girlfriend teaches Jr. High Students (7th and 8th grade) at a charter school in Camden (yes, that Camden). And while I can say this is hardly the only thing that sets charter schools apart (there are other factors, NJ charter schools do fail in their mission because they miss certain other qualities) all of these points are absolutely true.

    RedTide on
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  • kaleeditykaleedity Sometimes science is more art than science Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    geckahn wrote: »
    RedTide wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    geckahn wrote: »
    also public unions fucking suck.

    Why?

    Their ability to gain significant benefits at no gain and quite a bit of cost to the taxpayer is quite impressive.

    see: police unions, federal employee unions, teacher unions, etc.

    So what you end up with is huge pensions, a low bar for retirement, and unmotivated workers. I'm a defense contractor with the DoD and I work with federal employees all the time. They largely suck to work with.

    Union membership is far from a magic shield that keeps an employee from being canned for gross negligence or incompetence. Binding arbitration (the last resort to a union contract dispute) is typically avoidable if the administration in question behaves in a sound manner during negotiations and both sides make reasonable demands of the other.

    It also will seldom give an unfair reward (most decisions look at other locals and award based on the going rate plus cost of living, etc.) and typically big awards are only given when a local is out of step.

    dude. I'm talking about public unions. Not private ones. Lets not confuse the issue.

    You know how the department of defense gets rids of employees it no longer wants or needs? The usual step is to wait it out until retirement and then just not hire anyone else. The more drastic measure is to offer them an extremely unappealing position in say, Alaska, so they decline it and leave.

    Pretty much nobody ever gets fired. You would have to fuck up reallllly bad to merit that. People near retirement will read newspapers during meetings that theyre supposed to be paying attention at, and then get up and leave before its over. and nobody gives a fuck.

    Meanwhile, to actually get anything done, the government needs to hire extremely expensive contractors to actually do the work.

    In my experience they're promoted to a position where they no longer can cause problems, generally as a department head of a project in a field they've had little experience with.

    kaleedity on
  • override367override367 ALL minions Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    Has no child left behind ended yet? I know there's no quick solutions, but it certainly hasn't helped anything.
    Cauld wrote: »
    I read a Time Magazine article about the head of that charter school. It has longer school days, a shorter summer break, they study on Saturdays preparing for standardized tests, etc. There is a parent-school contract type thing that stipulates a certain amount of parental involvement as well.

    I've been thinking that we should eliminate the summer break and instead have week long breaks on a regular basis. Not sure if that would fix anything but it seems like a good idea, I know I read about it somewhere...

    override367 on
  • MalkorMalkor Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    ElJeffe wrote: »
    tbloxham wrote: »
    This may not be true of all children, but it is true of enough that bad behaviour cannot percolate and overwhelm the class. It only takes a small decrease in the number of 'bad kids' for the well behaved children to be dominant again and for poor behaviour to result in exclusion and marginalization, conversely a small increase is the difference between a school struggling with discipline and a drug addled war zone.

    Go go gadget anecdote:
    My fiance's mother teaches 7th grade english and from what I can tell even 1 or 2 bad kids in her class of 25 can be rather disruptive.

    Which is why kids who are acting up to the point of being disruptive should be removed from the room ASAP. Yes, constantly removing the same few kids from class will probably screw up their education, but at least it doesn't screw up the other 23.

    I hate to think of the kids who act up as not worth the effort, but you do bring up an interesting point. Some kids won't care that they're negatively impacting their own futures let alone the future of their classmates. They may look back and wish that they spent their time better or something I guess. The other kids and their parents shouldn't suffer because of this. But I don't know of a good way to explain to a parent (or kid!) that Judy/Jimmy's behavior isn't conducive to a learning environment and he/she should find something else to do while the rest of the class becomes productive citizens though.

    Malkor on
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  • SaammielSaammiel Registered User regular
    edited June 2010
    tbloxham wrote: »
    The objection is that this happens.....

    There is an 'OK' school with 100 students per year group and 4 teachers for that year group.

    25 behave well and want to learn
    50 are OK
    25 behave poorly and will be disruptive.

    20 sets of parents are active helping teachers.

    A charter school opens, taking 25 pupils in a year group and demanding a high level of parent interaction and taking 1 teacher. The best students move to it, now at our old school we have....

    3 Teachers

    5 well behaved children
    45 are OK
    25 behave poorly

    4 sets of parents are actively helping teachers.

    Based on the article though, your scenario isn't true due to the following. First I'm going to up the granularity so I don't have to talk about fractions of a teacher. Say we have 2000 pupils and $400 million in 'resources' (teachers, supplies, whatever) If the charter school is taking 500 pupils, it doesn't stand to reason that it would also take $100 million in resources. In essence the marginal cost of acheivement is lower. So maybe they could get by with just $50 million (I don't know the exact magnitude of these differences, would probably require some study on the part of the gov't).

    You would then have $350 million (or whatever) to spread amongst the remaining students.
    Now, rather than the OK children being pulled equally in both directions, positive and negative by the children at the extremes there are far more negative influences. There are also fewer parents helping. This creates a self reinforcing problem where discipline degrades, there are now more discipline problems, and less manpower to solve the problems.

    So, by creating the charter school we have gone from a situation where our 4 teachers provided an OK experience to 50 children, a good experience to 25 and a bad experience to 25 to once where 75 children get a bad experience, and 25 children get an exceptional one. It's really a problem of manpower and influence.

    The solution isn't to retain the good students in that environment and just hope that their influence contervails that of the poor students. It is to segregate the student base futher, into maybe classrooms/schools for ok students and those for remedial students. So following the previous numbers, maybe those 50 ok students, going to Billy Bob's School for the Average require $150 million amongst them to acheive their educational goals.

    Then you have some set for the remedial kids. Maybe realistically these kids have little chance of pulling ahead. You don't want to give up on them completely, but you also don't want to target them in the same way you would target a child who is just average. They would then get the remaining slice of the pie, $200 million, to try and bring them up to whatever level we can.

    And it isn't just about raw dollar amounts, I was mostly using that as an abstraction. The actual nature of the pedagogy and class offerings could vary as well. The current monolithic system seems ill-suited except for the well-off who can simply move to a good public school district or incur the additional cost of sending their kids to a private school.

    Saammiel on
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