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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 th

by 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.

by ashark 9y ago

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.