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Taken from Wikipedia: "Since lower socioeconomic groups and children with learning and behavioral problems have lower rates of participation in French immersi

Taken from Wikipedia: "Since lower socioeconomic groups and children with learning and behavioral problems have lower rates of participation in French immersion, a situation has developed in which ambitious families might prefer French immersion for its effective streaming than for the bilingual skills it gives to students." I don't see how this is a problem, as you've noted it.

ashark 9y ago
This kind of thing happens everywhere. Good school districts in the US aren't usually good because they're better funded or because the teachers are really amazing (those things may or may not be true) but because a variety of factors (including housing costs, commutes poorly served by public transit) result in much higher average teachability and lower disruptiveness in the student body. You're purchasing good peers for your kids when you buy/rent housing in a good district, above all else.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Good school districts in the US aren't usually good because they're better funded or because the teachers are really amazing (those things may or may not be true) but because a variety of factors (including housing costs, commutes poorly served by public transit) result in much higher average teachability Good school districts are generally good because they have a higher proportion of students with educated parents who can positively model intellectual engagement, and provide educational opportunities and resources. It's not necessarily that the reachability of the students is better any more that the teaching is better, it's that the students in those districts are likely to be both being taught and learning independently outside of school, which gives better results. Better school districts don't make your kid perform better, so much as your ability to afford to get into a better school district is correlated with features which would result in your kid doing better anywhere.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Being educated in classrooms where there aren't constant severe disruptions, where there's a much lower chance your kid will fall in with a crowd so bad that they end up in jail, where a higher percentage of their peers all expect/are expected to attend college, and so on, absolutely improves your child's educational (and other) prospects. Peers matter a ton. By high school peer expectations to study and maintain a certain level of academic seriousness will be 100x more effective than anything a parent can do or say—and so would peer behavior and attitudes going the other direction. But yes, the kids are better (less disruptive, more teachable) peers mostly due to their home lives.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Where “good peers” means that the other students have quiet space to do homework, enough money in the family that everyone isn’t constantly stressed about losing their house, access to office supplies and books, a comfortable bed to sleep in, access to fresh vegetables instead of highly processed food, good health insurance, are not located next to a superfund site or living in a house filled with lead paint, haven’t had their fathers dragged off to prison for small-time drug offenses, don’t need to be taking care of younger siblings because their single mother works 2 jobs, don’t get treated suspiciously by shopkeepers, aren’t harassed by the police all the time, don’t need to go through metal detectors every day on the way into school, have the resources to pay for extracurricular music lessons and private math tutoring, go to a school where the teacher turnover is low and the school can afford to maintain the facilities and provide materials, .....
      - bluGill 9y ago
        All the things you list correlate well with academic success, but which is really required? We know that in the era of lead paint plenty of kids did well in school. I can make good arguments for most of the rest that plenty of kids do well in school without them.
      - ashark 9y ago
        Oh, absolutely, but the reasons aren't important if you're just trying to choose the best school for your kid. It's gonna be the one with the more privileged kids of richer parents, pretty much every time, and the fact of the kids being more privileged, with the attitudes and expectations that go along with that, will have a larger effect on educational (and other) outcomes for your kid than any other (plausibly/realistically-tuned) factor like funding levels (which will incidentally tend to be really good in rich districts, but that's way less important than the kids/families in the district) or teacher quality or anything like that.
- KZeillmann 9y ago
  Except that good school districts usually are better funded because they're paid for with property taxes.
  - ashark 9y ago
    The really bad schools receive a lot of outside money. Around here they pay substantially better than the good schools. It doesn't help much, because the money's not what's making the difference. [EDIT] Clarification: what is making the difference is selection bias, basically. The kids in the richer districts are way the hell easier to educate. Easy-to-educate kids tend to be so for reasons (family circumstances/priorities/wealth) that also make them more likely to leave a poorly-performing district for better (more expensive to live in) districts. Effectively addressing the things that make some of the kids easy to educate and some very difficult will have very little to do with school quality/funding.
  - danielvf 9y ago
    That's commonly said, but I checked my cities budget numbers and it's actually the opposite. The city average per pupil is $9,215 per year. The school system as a whole is funded citywide, then funding is allocated by the school system with extra money and teachers sent into "bad" schools. The "bad schools" have more teachers per student, more money per student, and smaller schools, and average between $12,000 and $14,000 per pupil. However, if you move out of the city, across the state line, to the richer bedrooms community with the really good public schools, you will find that they spend even less per student than the average city school. The best school system in the metro area spends $7,600 per student. Parents matter far more than the amount of money spent on the school system.
  - slededit 9y ago
    This is not the case in Canada where this article takes its data from.

ashark 9y ago

This kind of thing happens everywhere. Good school districts in the US aren't usually good because they're better funded or because the teachers are really amazing (those things may or may not be true) but because a variety of factors (including housing costs, commutes poorly served by public transit) result in much higher average teachability and lower disruptiveness in the student body. You're purchasing good peers for your kids when you buy/rent housing in a good district, above all else.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Good school districts in the US aren't usually good because they're better funded or because the teachers are really amazing (those things may or may not be true) but because a variety of factors (including housing costs, commutes poorly served by public transit) result in much higher average teachability Good school districts are generally good because they have a higher proportion of students with educated parents who can positively model intellectual engagement, and provide educational opportunities and resources. It's not necessarily that the reachability of the students is better any more that the teaching is better, it's that the students in those districts are likely to be both being taught and learning independently outside of school, which gives better results. Better school districts don't make your kid perform better, so much as your ability to afford to get into a better school district is correlated with features which would result in your kid doing better anywhere.
- ashark 9y ago
  Being educated in classrooms where there aren't constant severe disruptions, where there's a much lower chance your kid will fall in with a crowd so bad that they end up in jail, where a higher percentage of their peers all expect/are expected to attend college, and so on, absolutely improves your child's educational (and other) prospects. Peers matter a ton. By high school peer expectations to study and maintain a certain level of academic seriousness will be 100x more effective than anything a parent can do or say—and so would peer behavior and attitudes going the other direction. But yes, the kids are better (less disruptive, more teachable) peers mostly due to their home lives.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Where “good peers” means that the other students have quiet space to do homework, enough money in the family that everyone isn’t constantly stressed about losing their house, access to office supplies and books, a comfortable bed to sleep in, access to fresh vegetables instead of highly processed food, good health insurance, are not located next to a superfund site or living in a house filled with lead paint, haven’t had their fathers dragged off to prison for small-time drug offenses, don’t need to be taking care of younger siblings because their single mother works 2 jobs, don’t get treated suspiciously by shopkeepers, aren’t harassed by the police all the time, don’t need to go through metal detectors every day on the way into school, have the resources to pay for extracurricular music lessons and private math tutoring, go to a school where the teacher turnover is low and the school can afford to maintain the facilities and provide materials, .....
    - bluGill 9y ago
      All the things you list correlate well with academic success, but which is really required? We know that in the era of lead paint plenty of kids did well in school. I can make good arguments for most of the rest that plenty of kids do well in school without them.
    - ashark 9y ago
      Oh, absolutely, but the reasons aren't important if you're just trying to choose the best school for your kid. It's gonna be the one with the more privileged kids of richer parents, pretty much every time, and the fact of the kids being more privileged, with the attitudes and expectations that go along with that, will have a larger effect on educational (and other) outcomes for your kid than any other (plausibly/realistically-tuned) factor like funding levels (which will incidentally tend to be really good in rich districts, but that's way less important than the kids/families in the district) or teacher quality or anything like that.
KZeillmann 9y ago
Except that good school districts usually are better funded because they're paid for with property taxes.
- ashark 9y ago
  The really bad schools receive a lot of outside money. Around here they pay substantially better than the good schools. It doesn't help much, because the money's not what's making the difference. [EDIT] Clarification: what is making the difference is selection bias, basically. The kids in the richer districts are way the hell easier to educate. Easy-to-educate kids tend to be so for reasons (family circumstances/priorities/wealth) that also make them more likely to leave a poorly-performing district for better (more expensive to live in) districts. Effectively addressing the things that make some of the kids easy to educate and some very difficult will have very little to do with school quality/funding.
- danielvf 9y ago
  That's commonly said, but I checked my cities budget numbers and it's actually the opposite. The city average per pupil is $9,215 per year. The school system as a whole is funded citywide, then funding is allocated by the school system with extra money and teachers sent into "bad" schools. The "bad schools" have more teachers per student, more money per student, and smaller schools, and average between $12,000 and $14,000 per pupil. However, if you move out of the city, across the state line, to the richer bedrooms community with the really good public schools, you will find that they spend even less per student than the average city school. The best school system in the metro area spends $7,600 per student. Parents matter far more than the amount of money spent on the school system.
- slededit 9y ago
  This is not the case in Canada where this article takes its data from.