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Education and Stuff Like Charter Schools and Private Shit and Whatnot
ElJeffe
Registered User, ClubPA regular
Registered User, ClubPA regular
@spool32 - I broke this off into a different thread since it really isn't appropriate for the Election Thread:
Let's start with some background information:
My kids go to a charter school. (Before you go firing the hypocricy cannon, I will point out that I have no problem with individual citizens working within established laws in their own self-interests, even if they do things that are not in the public interest in aggregate. I have specifically defended Romney on the basis of his tax returns provided he has done everything legally, with the argument that he has no moral obligation to pay more than the minimum he is legally required to pay, and thus his only transgressions are A) refusing to release them, and
arguing to make the tax system even shittier.) In California, charter schools are all free for some reason. I don't know how the funding of my child's school affects the funding for other schools. The school my kids would otherwise be going to is actually a pretty great school with extremely high scores, but the charter is a Montessori school that I feel better reflects my children's optimal learning environment. Also, I will state here that I have no problem with private schools or charter schools in principle, provided they do not result in a decrease in funding for public schools.
Moving on.
As a parent of a child in a charter school, I am well-versed in how much sway parents have over the operations of the school. As the friend of multiple parents with kids in public schools, I am also well-versed in how much sway those parents have over the operations in their schools. The difference between these two, in my experience, is so small that Heisenberg would just throw up his hands and say "fuck if I know." Parents in general, at least of the sort to be publicly vocal about their kids' educations, are a bunch of catty bitches who complain about everything and make crazypants demands all the time. The ways in which I have seen parents directly affect their child's education is by going up to their specific teacher and talking to them about the specific needs of their child. I have seen this method fail approximately point-five percent of the time. And this point-five percent has involved an exceptionally... special child, let's say. If you want to expand definitions a bit, though, my daughter had a teacher last year who was not great, by virtue of it being the teacher's first year. We made sure to keep involved in our daughter's education. She survived a single year of having a non-stellar teacher. Yay, her.
That meandered a bit, but let's just say that I am unconvinced by your assertion that private and charter school parents have unbridled control over their child's education, while public school parents are completely powerless.
But let's say your kid is in a genuinely poor school. Your solution is to basically abandon it, yes? Take all the money away and then... what? Literally let the school close down? And all the other kids... get bused to other schools, which will then likely be overcrowded? And in so doing, the parents who have the means to supplement the voucher money with their own money can save their children from a bad school. Genuine questions: is it a concern of yours what effect this has on the parents who cannot take advantage of the vouchers, or what effect it would have on neighboring public schools suddenly forced to accept more children as the poorly-performing school is left to die? Do you have any target numbers on this for acceptability, such as if X children are saved by the free-market, it is okay to hurt the educations of these Y other kids? Do you ascribe inherent value to school choice, such that you'd rather offer such choice and help X people than not offer such choice and help X+Y people, for certain values of X and Y, or do you support vouchers because you think it is the solution that helps more people in the long run?
I'd also like to explore this claim:
Are you denying, then, that literally any educational policy ever is going to harm some people and hurt others? I mean, let's get rid of the weasel-word "might" up there, because that same "might" can go in reverse - it's not like you have an iron-clad 100% guarantee that shelling out $20k/yr for your kid's elementary school is going to be an improvement.
As a parent, I understand the sentiment of not wanting to hurt your kid in order to benefit other kids. But I trust that you understand "it would help/harm my kid" is a shitty basis for policy, yes? It's not like we're crafting the Help Spool's Kids Act of 2012 here, and presumably - while you might vote against it for personal reasons - you would still accept a law that, say, helped every other kid in the nation while hurting your specific child as a good idea, correct?
So let's say we now have two proposals for your shitty-school: first, we can pull money out of your school and give it to you, so that you can send your kid elsewhere; second, we can devote funding to fix your school's issues, which are probably not a big mystery on a per-school basis. (And while it's true that our per-capita educational expenditures are crazy-high, it's not generally the case that crappy schools are seeing all of that money; it very much is a funding problem that affects other things such as resources, space, number of qualified teachers, lack of special needs staff, etc.) Assume that both are potential solutions. Why is the former a better solution overall? Sure, it might be hard to "sell that" to the parent who could afford to move their kid immediately. But how do you sell your voucher proposal to the parent who won't be able to send their kid to the great charter school even with the government-funded discount coupon?
This is why I say the Democratic position is really, really terrible: to me, your argument boils down to "if we don't make kids suffer and block all escape routes, their parents will never agree to pouring even more money into the terrible system making their kids suffer".
I prefer to send my kids to a school that is using those exact same tax dollars to achieve a far better result. If I stayed in the public system, by the time the school gets fixed (if it ever does) the harm to my children is already done.
Welcome to modern civilization! It is impossible to craft literally a single policy on anything that will no adversely affect someone somewhere. Which is why we don't craft policy for individuals, but rather for the public as a whole.
In this instance, it is impossible to ensure that 100% of children have good schools and good teachers. Some kids in some places will wind up with shitty educations. Resign to this fact. Our job as a society is not to get all mopey because we failed to do an impossible thing. Our job is to do the best we can in an imperfect world. If you give parents in a school money to move their kids to a different school, less than 100% of them will actually take that opportunity. The remainder will be unable to for various reasons that you have only so much control over. And they will now be attending a school that has been completely crippled by siphoning out money to give to private schools.
If something - a school, a hospital, whatever - is broken, figure out why and fix it. Do not just give people coupons for 20% off an education/heart-transplant/etc and pat yourself on the back because you totally used the free market to solve everything.
There are a number of problems with this approach. Firstly, If there were no charter schools I'd still have no ability to effect change in the school my kids went to. No one school's parents can resist the local and national teacher's unions even if they were 100% in agreement about what to do, so fixing the problem in anything like a timely fashion isn't possible. Especially when there is no stick to be wielded by the parents. If I say "Do better or else ... !" how do you complete that sentence in an environment with no options and no ability to change staff or curriculum?
Secondly, I think the idea that I should resign myself to a substandard or destructive educational environment for my own children because in the aggregate it might help society a little bit is a difficult sell at the very best, and not a trade I'm really willing to make.
This is almost exactly what I fear about UHC as well.. the attitude that it's OK for individuals to suffer and die right now (yes, I said 'and die', because you mentioned heart transplants!) if the goal is to hopefully make things better for other people, maybe, at some time in the future.
It's the 'make omelette? Start breaking eggs' argument. Generally that's not a great one to make.
Let's start with some background information:
My kids go to a charter school. (Before you go firing the hypocricy cannon, I will point out that I have no problem with individual citizens working within established laws in their own self-interests, even if they do things that are not in the public interest in aggregate. I have specifically defended Romney on the basis of his tax returns provided he has done everything legally, with the argument that he has no moral obligation to pay more than the minimum he is legally required to pay, and thus his only transgressions are A) refusing to release them, and
arguing to make the tax system even shittier.) In California, charter schools are all free for some reason. I don't know how the funding of my child's school affects the funding for other schools. The school my kids would otherwise be going to is actually a pretty great school with extremely high scores, but the charter is a Montessori school that I feel better reflects my children's optimal learning environment. Also, I will state here that I have no problem with private schools or charter schools in principle, provided they do not result in a decrease in funding for public schools.Moving on.
As a parent of a child in a charter school, I am well-versed in how much sway parents have over the operations of the school. As the friend of multiple parents with kids in public schools, I am also well-versed in how much sway those parents have over the operations in their schools. The difference between these two, in my experience, is so small that Heisenberg would just throw up his hands and say "fuck if I know." Parents in general, at least of the sort to be publicly vocal about their kids' educations, are a bunch of catty bitches who complain about everything and make crazypants demands all the time. The ways in which I have seen parents directly affect their child's education is by going up to their specific teacher and talking to them about the specific needs of their child. I have seen this method fail approximately point-five percent of the time. And this point-five percent has involved an exceptionally... special child, let's say. If you want to expand definitions a bit, though, my daughter had a teacher last year who was not great, by virtue of it being the teacher's first year. We made sure to keep involved in our daughter's education. She survived a single year of having a non-stellar teacher. Yay, her.
That meandered a bit, but let's just say that I am unconvinced by your assertion that private and charter school parents have unbridled control over their child's education, while public school parents are completely powerless.
But let's say your kid is in a genuinely poor school. Your solution is to basically abandon it, yes? Take all the money away and then... what? Literally let the school close down? And all the other kids... get bused to other schools, which will then likely be overcrowded? And in so doing, the parents who have the means to supplement the voucher money with their own money can save their children from a bad school. Genuine questions: is it a concern of yours what effect this has on the parents who cannot take advantage of the vouchers, or what effect it would have on neighboring public schools suddenly forced to accept more children as the poorly-performing school is left to die? Do you have any target numbers on this for acceptability, such as if X children are saved by the free-market, it is okay to hurt the educations of these Y other kids? Do you ascribe inherent value to school choice, such that you'd rather offer such choice and help X people than not offer such choice and help X+Y people, for certain values of X and Y, or do you support vouchers because you think it is the solution that helps more people in the long run?
I'd also like to explore this claim:
I think the idea that I should resign myself to a substandard or destructive educational environment for my own children because in the aggregate it might help society a little bit is a difficult sell at the very best, and not a trade I'm really willing to make
Are you denying, then, that literally any educational policy ever is going to harm some people and hurt others? I mean, let's get rid of the weasel-word "might" up there, because that same "might" can go in reverse - it's not like you have an iron-clad 100% guarantee that shelling out $20k/yr for your kid's elementary school is going to be an improvement.
As a parent, I understand the sentiment of not wanting to hurt your kid in order to benefit other kids. But I trust that you understand "it would help/harm my kid" is a shitty basis for policy, yes? It's not like we're crafting the Help Spool's Kids Act of 2012 here, and presumably - while you might vote against it for personal reasons - you would still accept a law that, say, helped every other kid in the nation while hurting your specific child as a good idea, correct?
So let's say we now have two proposals for your shitty-school: first, we can pull money out of your school and give it to you, so that you can send your kid elsewhere; second, we can devote funding to fix your school's issues, which are probably not a big mystery on a per-school basis. (And while it's true that our per-capita educational expenditures are crazy-high, it's not generally the case that crappy schools are seeing all of that money; it very much is a funding problem that affects other things such as resources, space, number of qualified teachers, lack of special needs staff, etc.) Assume that both are potential solutions. Why is the former a better solution overall? Sure, it might be hard to "sell that" to the parent who could afford to move their kid immediately. But how do you sell your voucher proposal to the parent who won't be able to send their kid to the great charter school even with the government-funded discount coupon?
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ElJeffe on
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"There are a number of problems with this approach. Firstly, If there were no charter schools I'd still have no ability to effect change in the school my kids went to. No one school's parents can resist the local and national teacher's unions even if they were 100% in agreement about what to do, so fixing the problem in anything like a timely fashion isn't possible. Especially when there is no stick to be wielded by the parents. If I say "Do better or else ... !" how do you complete that sentence in an environment with no options and no ability to change staff or curriculum?"
Ask the Finns? You seem to operate under the assumption that moving to another school (running away) is the only way you can affect any kind of change.
Firstly: My kids also go to a charter school: http://harmonytx.org/ . It's also free, as are all charter schools in Texas. There's no voucher program; enrollment is done via lottery from every new application submitted. Regarding parental ability to solve problems within the school, it really depends on the administration. It's simply not a viable solution to the problem of bad teaching to say "well, parents should talk to the teachers." Let me give you an example: last year, one of my daughter's teachers gave her video production class a final exam that involved groups creating a 30min film. With no time allotted to work on the project in class, arrangements to get the group together were left up to the parents. It consumed every available moment while she was also studying for AP exams and finals her core subjects. It was patently impossible, and the teacher wouldn't budge on the assignment even though I and six other parents asked her to do so in the interests of passing actual core requirements alongside this elective. She wouldn't budge. The groups finally got together on Facebook and agreed that none of them would turn in a video longer than 10min, basically daring her to fail them all. Meanwhile we spoke with the school administration and they agreed to review whatever grades came out of the class.
This story has a happy ending, though. Thankfully she elected not to fail them all. Moreover, the school collected all the written complaints we made, provided us with a response they apparently instructed her to write, and set new rules for electives that require the administration review mid-term and final exam expectations and provide that information to parents before the schedules are locked in for the year.
I don't know how typical this is of charter schools, and my main point here is not just to trot out anecdotes but to highlight:
The admin staff created a feedback loop in response to complaints that will serve future parents and put the teachers on notice that they won't be able to demand unreasonable levels of work for their underwater basket-weaving elective. This sort of thing doesn't happen in public schools because it's simply not policy, because administrations don't want the extra work, and because teachers don't like helicopter parents screeching at them all the time.
Most of our kids' teachers schedule a home visit each year to talk with us individually. There's an iPhone and android app that tracks their grades and attendance daily, and where all the homework is posted by 4PM every afternoon. This school is committed to bringing parents in, and to being responsive to complaints. Public schools are simply not aligned toward this sort of relationship, and I believe it's at least partly because they don't view us as customers who might leave if we don't like the job they're doing.
I'll give you another example: in 4th grade, my youngest child was in public school (still hadn't succeeded in the charter lottery) and we learned that he, to our amazement, still didn't know his multiplication tables by heart. He'd been sneaking a calculator for homework and his teacher apparently allowed him to count on his fingers. In the 4th grade. When we spoke to her about this she promised to give him extra attention and extra homework. She did neither of these things. The administration refused to help me understand how he got out of the 3rd grade without knowing, as that's a major portion of the year's math work, and nobody had any explanation as to why we hadn't been told he had a problem with multiplying. At first, they didn't actually grasp that I felt he had a problem we needed to fix. I have no idea whether anything changed about requirements, what the policy on contacting parents was, or whether anything was said to that teacher at all. So far as I can tell, exactly nothing has changed, she will continue to "teach" math, and we handled it with nightly flash cards until he hated the sight of them and could reliably tell me what 7*8= in less than 2 seconds.
I don't think it's completely black and white, but I do think that the public system is institutionally resistant to change and to oversight by parents. Bunker mentality perhaps. Charter schools are more reactive because they need to be. Their entire student body is parented by people already empowered to demand change or move schools.
I'm not really sure what the best solution is to your question about kids in a genuinely bad school. Our first problem is that we don't really have very good ways to even determine what parts of the school are dysfunctional, much less address them. The institutions are resistant to oversight and measurement of any sort, and are willing to fight against any step toward quantifying poor performance. I mean... what makes a good school principal? I don't know how we might measure that, but it needs to be done. How do we tell whether the teacher simply isn't cut out for teaching, or whether she's got a classroom full of 5th graders who've never seen a book without pictures in it except in the school library?
Regarding concern for kids whose parents can't take advantage of vouchers: it's not a system I'm familiar with (no vouchers here, it's just a lottery and it's 100% free) but I definitely am concerned. I don't believe we should abandon all public schools, or even most of them. I do think that their institutional nature and an incentive structure that does not drive teachers to excel (or even allow definition of excellence) is something that needs breaking down because it causes the worst problems in the schools where change is most needed.
I support charters because I think they offer an escape route for kids who want to succeed and will not get the opportunity in the district school, and I think it's important to have this escape available. I think it puts some pressure on the public system that parents otherwise cannot, and some pressure is needed. Shit has been broken for decades, in the same way, and little if any progress has been made.
I would accept that such a law would be good. Thankfully we're not in that sort of situation!
The problem with your final question is the assumption that they're both viable solutions. I don't believe that "devoting money to fix the problem" comes with the attendant oversight and focus needed to actually fix the problems, and I have no confidence that teacher's unions would be willing to accept changes that resulted in a bunch of firing, establishment of performance metrics, definition of and consequences for failure, and so on, all made publicly available at a far more granular level. I mean, I have an independent ranking of the top 20 high schools in central Texas. Our Harmony campus is #3. What that number means, though, I honestly couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that my oldest son's Turkish teacher came to my house for dinner. He brought baklavah and we had pasta and talked about Turkey, the language, and what my son could expect from the next 4 years of language studies. That is value, and it's rare at best in the public system.
I would be in favor, all things being equal, of making the public system we have into a better one. Hell I'm in favor of it, period. In this case I don't think it's possible without dramatically redefining the relationship between parents, teachers, administrators, school boards, and the money that funds the schools. Until we can do that, some other solution has to be found for kids like mine, who want a better education and cannot get it in the public system.
How did they turn that around? I know that they still have a reputation as the idiots of Scandinavia because the turnaround is so recent.
They also have basically no high-stakes standardized testing, school choice/privatization or other "performance incentives." The focus is on equity, not competition. Upwards of 95 percent of Finnish teachers are unionized.
The only thing there I'd quibble with is the testing, as there needs to be some sort of accountability for how the kids are graded and passed. My state used to have several schools that would make sure even the students who didn't know jack shit could get the degree.
It looks like, currently, we basically have a battle of anecdotes. The institutional problems you mention are A) not things that I have witnessed first-hand in my children's or friends' children's education, and
And if you take that (probably) good teacher and subject her to the sort of things you suggest - yelling at her and cutting her pay and threatening to fire her - all you'll get is one more teacher leaving an already understaffed field, to be replaced by another (probably) good teacher who will also wind up looking shitty. Which is, I think, a pretty good description of what we're seeing in lower-performing schools. It's not like we haven't tried the methods you endorse - we've thrown more testing at them, we've cut funding from underperforming schools, we've demonized the shit out of the entire profession. And strangely, these things haven't realized all the dramatic improvements you predict.
And I find it odd that you assert that charter schools, and the threat of school choice against poorly performing schools, are the answer here, while also mentioning that the charter schools in your area have done dick as far as forcing those public schools to make themselves better. If charter schools haven't made public schools better yet, then why do you believe that even more charter schools suddenly will?
And while I alluded to it before, I will mention again explicitly because I find the claim so bizarre: we absolutely know what the problems are with our schools. It is not some great mystery. I challenge you to find someone who works at a shitty school who, when asked what the problems are, will just shrug and say, "Fuck if I know!" They are funding issues. The schools need certain things and they do not have the money to acquire these things. Well-performing schools tend to be the ones in wealthy neighborhoods with high property taxes that enrich local schools. Poor-performing schools tend to be the ones in crappy neighborhoods with low property taxes. Doesn't that sort of tell you something?
The problems do not stem from lazy teachers or evil teacher unions (and honestly, how did we get to the point where the teachers are the bad guys? it is fucking looney-toons that this is a thing that people argue). They stem from basic educational supplies not being provided, and from a system that increasingly provides disincentives for people entering that system. And nothing about "school choice" addresses these issues even indirectly. In fact, they specifically exacerbate the problems.
I'm curious as to how federal and state governments determine how much money to give to various schools. What might be sort of nice is to establish a baseline level of funding based on looking at a hypothetical average-performing school and determining its effective funding. Then normalize that based on cost of living and regional variation and whatnot, and guarantee that every school in the country receives that much money from the combination of local, state, and federal revenue sources. Maybe alter the amount based on factors such as the prevalence of special needs kids and the like. I'm curious to see what happens if we, as a nation, actually provide funding for schools at reasonable levels.
so wait did you never actually watch your kid do math homework?
Parents that are uninvolved love to blame other people for the shortfalls of their own parenting when it comes to their kid's education.
A child's education requires 2/3 of this equation : Parents, Teachers, Students. Basically if a parent isnt involved neither is the child and there's nothing a teacher can do about it.
That actually didn't register when I first read it, but I am curious how you can miss the fact that your kid can't do basic arithmetic. It would make more sense if it was, like, geometry or algebra or something.
Increased funding will probably alleviate some of the problem, but insufficient funding is not itself the root problem in our school system, nor is increased spending the best solution. So, I'm not against giving money to the schools that need it, but I think it's short-sighted to think that will bring about long term improvement in the education system.
I have some moderately informed thoughts on what these are, but I don't have time for that right now.
The issue isn't even school funding per se, although that is a confounding factor in many districts. The problem is that children in poor neighbourhoods do not come to school prepared to learn. The achievement gap between rich and poor and black and white is evident before formal schooling even begins. This is the result of a constellation of problems that plague poor children. These problems include but are not limited to lack of intellectual stimulation in the home during critical periods of brain development, malnutrition, health problems resulting from lack of access to care, health problems resulting from exposure to environmental toxins, and parents who are themselves poorly educated and do not know how to support their children's learning at home.
Research does show that teacher quality is the most important factor in a child's education within the school itself. However, socioeconomic status is overwhelmingly more important to a child's success in school than anything that happens in the classroom.
Yeah that's true, but there are a fuck ton of schools which are woefully understaffed and underequipped and those schools are invariably in our poorer or more rural areas.
The biggest thing we could do is stop treating education like a business. Like most things the government does, there isn't a "private sector" equivalent.
Newsflash, parents: you are not your child's school's customer. At least not directly. Our school system is meant to do one thing: give us a well educated citizenry which is prepared to enter the workforce or continue on in education. We are all the "customer" not just the parents.
But again, even that's a weak metaphor because education shouldn't be run like a goddamn business.
Until we can wrap our hands around that we're basically fucked.
It's going to be interesting when your kid gets to college, and finds out that such things are the norm there. Oh, and that the professors could care less about their other classes/extracurriculars/jobs/etc., and will happily fail them. And that the administration has heard all this before, and really could not care less. It's also telling that it was the parents' responsibility to arrange for the groups to meet in your view, and not the students', which is a really bad lesson to be teaching them. It's also telling that you consider a course in video production - which is a pretty useful skill in today's media-saturated world, and a good stepping stone to media course tracks in college - as "underwater basketweaving".
In short, the person who was in the wrong here was you, frankly. Creating a thirty minute video as a group project for a course on video production is in no way unreasonable, and is actually meant to test several skills beyond the coursework, like delegation and team coordination. The administration failed you by caving into your demands, instead of pointing out that they were giving you exactly what you had demanded (but clearly what you did not really want) - an aggressive curriculum designed to push the students.
So, was his problem that he didn't understand the mechanics of multiplication? Or that he just didn't have a form of rote knowledge that is of questionable utility, especially in this day and age? They may not have felt that he had a problem, if he had the ability to perform the computation and was performing well in other tasks - if he was able to break down a word problem and solve it, but was slow on the computation side, I would imagine they see that as being the more important skill set to develop. Just because you see something as a problem doesn't mean that it is one in reality.
And as other people have been pointing out, if you needed to be told that he had a problem with multiplying, that's a pretty big oversight on your part.
The resistance to oversight by parents is because, frankly, parents rarely have either the knowledge or the emotional separation to honestly provide that oversight. Your two examples are good demonstrations of this. Just because you demand change does not mean that the change is either warranted, necessary, or even desirable.
Private/Charter/whatever schools though are an example of a prisoners dilemma. If all the kids are at a pretty good public school, and a new great private school opens up then for the individual it's best to move their child to it. However, as more and more people want to do this prices at the private school will rise and poorer kids can't go. As such the poorer kids (who were the most in need of high quality education support anyway!) are stuck at a now terrible public school that all the rich local parents are doing all in their power to limit funding to.
Choice is important, and I wouldn't take it away from parents but they should understand that withdrawing their kid from the local school should in no way affect the amount of funding per pupil it gets. Lobbying for that to happen is highly hypocritical. It's hard to imagine a perfect solution really. I'm betting it starts with paying teachers more and giving them more reasons to be enthusiastic, especially in poorer performing schools.
This would seem to imply a baseline level of public funding being shit, and schools simply being a reflection of their economic geography. My answer to this would be to treat public school funding like the ACA treats insurance; if you're doing well, maybe you should help those who aren't. It's a multifocal problem, to be sure, because you can't just keep throwing good money after bad, and you can't force parents to give a shit if they don't. You can, however, remove especially talented students in the these problem areas and place them in magnet schools to ensure they're reaching their potentials.
Multiplying: Yeah, it was an oversight. I've got a disabled wife and three kids, one of whom is an excellent liar. He bullshitted us for months, and I'm kinda embarrassed by it. Even so, I'm not teaching math class to him every day for those months - the teacher should've informed me there was a problem, but the teacher didn't even think there was a problem. Everyone seems to have just skated right by that part of the story. Multiplying via fingers was apparently cool with her.
You too will be fooled by your children at some point. Also you. And you. Be careful how stridently you judge me on this, folks.
And yeah, he hadn't done the memorization. I defy you to find any competent grade school math teacher who doesn't think it's important just as a basic life skill to be able to do basic multiplying quickly in your head. Your question does highlight another problem though - there's no communication about whether these sorts of skills are required in the public school, and no good system where breakdowns in communication or gaps in education can be identified and filled.
@angelhedgie Do you have kids? I'm at a complete loss as to how you expect a bunch of 15yr old kids to arrange meetings for themselves without parental involvement. They cannot physically arrive at the same location without parental involvement - it was illegal for any of them to drive. They each have families, and often other siblings, with competing schedules that need to be balanced.
Have you ever shot and cut together 30 minutes of original video? It's a time-consuming process at best, especially for a bunch of kids doing it for the first time. You also don't know what the rest of the workload was, so your opinion as to whether it was excessive is, to put it frankly, ignorant. You literally do not know what you're talking about.
It'll be like that in college: yes, and the kids will be 3 years older, with (hopefully) a lot more maturity and independence. Expecting a high school sophomore to tackle problems like a college freshman is unreasonable and silly.
I was wrongly dismissive of the elective course: Nope. It was a one semester elective for freshmen and sophomores and while I hoped she'd learn something, I didn't expect or intend, and neither did she, to take on an exhaustive and intensive course on top of the rest of her work. That's why a better understanding of what a course will require, offered at the beginning of the year, was such a good solution. It allows parents and students to make informed decisions about what they feel will be too much of a load.
The disconnect was mainly in communicating expectations, and it was addressed because we were able to get the administration to see the value of addressing it. If you're hung up on my particular anecdote, discard it in favor of a hypothetical situation where it's certain that the administration should make a specific policy change. That sort of institutional change is far more difficult to enact in a public system, and it highlights exactly the sort of problem that won't be solved by money.
Gotta get back to work, @ElJeffe and others, a longer response will have to wait until later.
They don't have bicycles? I dunno, when I was 15 I didn't really have a problem meeting up with my friends without needing my parents.
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
They go to a charter school. The kids are scattered across a 30-40 mile suburban area.
Everybody biking to the local hangout is not possible. Well, OK I guess it's possible to find someplace 10-15 miles away they can all bike to, but you'll remember that my point here was the excessive workload this project put on the kids. Expecting them to all cycle 15 miles before they got started further highlights the point.
I don't know how technical you want to get, but like most Nordic/Scandinavian government stuff, the Finnish Education Ministry maintains an English website with a pretty good overview of how they get it done.
If you want more detailed info, I can poke around for Norwegian equivalents, since I do understand that language, and it follows a very similar model (the so-called "Nordic model").
The thing is, there are countries that operate their schools like that, though the mechanism is usually testing - do poorly enough, and you are completely blocked from further advancement.
I'm not writing this in a judgemental way or implying that you're a bad parent, Spool. I want that to be recognized up front. I think it's important to realize that the reason parents participate in discussions like this one is that they care about their kids and recognize the value of education.
The problem that I have with most of these conversations though is that we only ever talk about the responsibilities of the teacher -- and that's not just a problem I see with the argument that comes from a small subset of parents who hold certain political beliefs, everyone does it. In my local school district, the former administrative head, Michelle Rhee, made a huge fucking deal about how the most important thing was to hire the best teachers and fire the ones who underperformed, just for instance. Teachers unions, by their very nature, spend a whole hell of a lot of time talking about the importance of teachers and very little else.
But the thing is that kids are in school for like eight hours of the day, and once a student reaches junior high, that time is usually broken down so that the student only spends about 50 minutes with any given subject teacher before he shuffles off to his locker to pick up his books for the next class. During that 50 minutes, a teacher could have probably around 25 students to instruct, which my basic knowledge of multiplication tables tells me works out to 2 minutes of individual instruction per student if the teacher spends zero minutes in group instruction.
By contrast, students spend 2/3rds of their day somewhere other than school, and most of the time that means they're at home. But we spend so very little time talking about what role that time is supposed to play in the development of a child, except insofar as it applies to whatever homework a teacher is sending home. We spend very little time talking about how the parent could best utilize that time at home to further the educational development of their children. And perhaps now more than ever, that is at least as important a conversation for parents around the country to have because situations like yours aren't unique. Lots of families have a disabled parent, or are single parent homes, or are homes where both parents work. As the middle class gets squeezed, a lot of us are working longer hours than we've ever had to before. The result is that time off work is at a premium for most parents, and as a consequence, it would behoove use to learn how best we can maximize the effectiveness of every hour that we spend with our children. And you raise a good point when you bring up communication between home and school -- if we want to make sure our children get the best possible education, we need to do more to ensure that parents have a collaborative relationship with teachers, not an adversarial one.
We can continue to focus all of our time and energy talking about how to fund and whether or not we should be allowed to hire and fire the people who work at the institution where our kids spend 1/3rd of their day for five days a week during nine months out of every year. But if we do, we're ignoring some pretty important parts of the equation.
I think this is a vast majority of the issue, funding and where that money goes. I know several people that are teachers or work for public schools in my area. One of the city's high schools pays a person $100K/year to setup/maintain there schools IT stuffs. This is bat shit crazy to me as you are talking about some of the most basic technology infrastructure there is, and would make a perfect job for someone just starting in the IT world who would love to do that same job for half of that salary.
I had an old girl friend who's father was a custodian for this same school and was making $90K a year. I am all for people being able to make a good living at what they do, but there is a point where things reach the stupid zone.
If a 15 year old can arrange going out with her friends for fun, she can arrange meeting with her classmates for schoolwork. Hell, with facebook/cell phones/ichat/skype/email the kids don't even need to be in the same physical place to do projects anymore.
Regardless,even if the kids can't meet up without parent involvement. Giving your kid a ride across town so they can work on a project for an afternoon or two is pretty low bar to clear.
So, can I get to determine how much you make a year based on vague recollections? I find the argument that there should be some arbitrary limit to the pay of school staff to be rather offensive.
Eh, I made videos in middle school for school projects. One time made up an entire play. I would disagree with your estimate.
So, 30-60 man hours divided among 3-5 students.
And that's excessive?
You got exactly what you asked for - a school that takes its curriculum seriously. Which is exactly what the school administration should have told you when you complained.
The whole thing is a mess, but it was hit earlier in the thread: the problem with our schools is that a quarter of America's children are in fucking poverty. Five kids living in a tiny apartment sleeping on mattresses on the floor and getting their only decent meal of the day at school is fairly common ever since Clinton bought and resold the welfare queen narrative and cut aid the more kids you have
As I pointed out in the labor thread, remove the impoverished students from the equation, and the US ranks #1.
Heard something like that on NPR the other day -- Dianne Rehm, I think? -- though the proponents seemed to be couching it more in terms of, "look, it's not like most of these kids are ever going to use algebra anyway! So we'd save schools a lot of money if we targeted algebra education to those who were likely to use it!"
Never mind that there's a benefit to getting neurons to connect with other neurons in your brain that goes far beyond whether or not you'll ever use a quadratic equation in your daily life....
EDIT: And that's before we even consider the fact that the absolute best way to make sure a child never takes a job where she could potentially have to use algebra or higher math is to never, ever teach it to her.