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Then maybe we should focus on school reform as a whole and find out what makes mediocre schools mediocre? My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family

Then maybe we should focus on school reform as a whole and find out what makes mediocre schools mediocre? My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family and home environment of the students. I teach in the rural South (20% of the county is poverty line or below), and the issue isn't really with the students or the education. It lies in the expectations parents have and cultural values with regards to education. Furthermore, even among the poorer students, you can see those whose parents encourage them at home to do well in school. That's the main issue that affects school quality. With the upper middle class and wealthy you have students whose parents can spend time, encourage and help them (or get tutors), so of course that's going to happen more. And if you take the kids like that from the mediocre schools, or, really, take what money their taxes provide for the school system, you're just leaving the disadvantaged kids to be more disadvantaged. Let kids move, sure, but the funding shouldn't move with them.

chongli 8y ago
My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family and home environment of the students. It does, but it's not only that. For a student to excel they need a lot of different things and if they're deprived of any of them they will not do well. In your case, you may see a lot of students with a family/home environment that makes it difficult for them to focus. In other cases a student may have a more supportive home environment but their classmates don't and the slower pace the class may run at as a result leaves the student bored and disinterested. So a student needs a supportive family, access to proper nutrition, but also a curriculum of really challenging courses that pushes him/her to learn a lot. The latter need is why wealthy parents pull their kids out of public schools. Essentially, the problem with public schooling is the same one we saw with the mortgage crisis and one the insurance industry deals with all of the time: adverse selection [1]. Students that struggle due to lack of nutrition or a difficult family environment need a far greater share of the funding allocated to the school. Students with strong and supportive backgrounds get far less out of a school that focuses on struggling students. This encourages them to leave, just as an insurance policy that charges the same premium to both smokers and non-smokers tends to drive out the non-smokers. What we end up with are schools with disproportionate numbers of struggling students. So what's the answer? I don't think there is a single answer. A ton of commentators out there look to education as a silver bullet for class mobility. Yes, education correlates very strongly with career outcome. But education itself is an outcome of a whole host of factors and I strongly believe those need to be fixed, first. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection

chongli 8y ago

My guess is that a lot of it has to do with the family and home environment of the students. It does, but it's not only that. For a student to excel they need a lot of different things and if they're deprived of any of them they will not do well. In your case, you may see a lot of students with a family/home environment that makes it difficult for them to focus. In other cases a student may have a more supportive home environment but their classmates don't and the slower pace the class may run at as a result leaves the student bored and disinterested. So a student needs a supportive family, access to proper nutrition, but also a curriculum of really challenging courses that pushes him/her to learn a lot. The latter need is why wealthy parents pull their kids out of public schools. Essentially, the problem with public schooling is the same one we saw with the mortgage crisis and one the insurance industry deals with all of the time: adverse selection [1]. Students that struggle due to lack of nutrition or a difficult family environment need a far greater share of the funding allocated to the school. Students with strong and supportive backgrounds get far less out of a school that focuses on struggling students. This encourages them to leave, just as an insurance policy that charges the same premium to both smokers and non-smokers tends to drive out the non-smokers. What we end up with are schools with disproportionate numbers of struggling students. So what's the answer? I don't think there is a single answer. A ton of commentators out there look to education as a silver bullet for class mobility. Yes, education correlates very strongly with career outcome. But education itself is an outcome of a whole host of factors and I strongly believe those need to be fixed, first. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_selection