5 ms·

Um so what about the endless govt programs out there that were supposed to achieve things like this brat have failed? It's not like our country doesn't do anyt

Um so what about the endless govt programs out there that were supposed to achieve things like this brat have failed? It's not like our country doesn't do anything - it's a very complex problem. There are efforts and they tend to have mediocre results at best. I've personally worked in some of these programs and the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require. I'd wager that if you have ideas about how to fix these issues they'd be similarly flawed.

istjohn 7y ago
It's not really that hard though. It just takes money that we're unwilling to spend. Money for lead abatement, healthcare, early childhood education, summer programs, athletics, healthy school lunches, air conditioned classrooms, high-skilled and highly-paid teachers, intervention programs for at-risk youth, addiction treatment, school counselors, etc., etc. Basically, poor kids need all the stuff middle class kids take for granted. Who knew? And we can provide it to them. We just don't want to.
- bzbarsky 7y ago
  It's not just a matter of spending money. As a simple example, per the numbers cited at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/study_shows_huge_disparity_in.html http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud... DC public schools spend a good bit more per student that neighboring Montgomery County, MD. The schools in Montgomery County are quite a bit better in terms of most of the things you list, except perhaps addiction treatment and at-risk intervention programs (about which I can't speak usefully; I don't know much about the state of them in Montgomery County). Now DC is a pretty dysfunctional case in terms of the ineffectiveness of its spending. If I compare all the numbers being cited here to the numbers for Chicago Public Schools that https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cps-to-spend-an-additional-200-per-student-for-the-2017-18-school-year/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cps-to-spend-an-additional-20... mentions (which are easily 3x lower), it seems pretty clear to me that more money would in fact help improve CPS pretty drastically. And there are certainly lots of places in the US that are in the same situation as CPS. On the other hand, you also have the numbers in https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-student-than-any-other-us-state/ https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-stude... which has NYC schools at almost $22k per student, with somewhat mixed results. It's pretty common for suburban school districts to spend a good bit less than that with results that are comparable or better, for a variety of reasons. All of which is to say that there are some school districts where money would definitely help, some where fixing the systemic mismanagement of the large amounts of money already being spent would help more, and some where it's not clear what would help the most...
  - istjohn 7y ago
    I wonder if it's not that districts are mismanaging their resources but that when you try to provide education to students who live in poor communities you must confront all the pervasive effects of that poverty. And the cost of doing so approaches the cost of any functional social safety net. From that standpoint, of course it's much more expensive per pupil to provide a quality education to impoverished students. It may cost 2X or 3X as much to give these kids the same education their privileged counterparts are getting.
    - bzbarsky 7y ago
      It's both. It definitely costs more to educate kids without support from home than it does to educate kids who do have such support, for example. And at the same time, some of the school districts involved are in fact horribly mismanaged. Throwing money at education _can_ help. It just doesn't _have_ to, unfortunately...
verisimilidude 7y ago
> the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require This is a solved problem in other countries. Finland is a good example. Their education system focuses on equality above all: all kids are going to have access to the same educational opportunities, even if equality comes at the cost of quality. As part of this idea, privately funded schools are not allowed. Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools, in a place where all schools must be equal above all? Suddenly all the schools improve. The problem isn't inherent to government in principle, but perhaps to our forms of government in America in practice.
- bluthru 7y ago
  >Finland is a good example. No, you need to control for demographics.
- Ma8ee 7y ago
  > Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools This was my greatest concerned, which unfortunately proved true, when we introduced private schools in Sweden: previously if your kid didn't get a good education you had to try to improve the school. So the efforts of the resourceful parents helped the kids with less resourceful parents. Now when people are unhappy with their kids education they just send them to a different school, leaving the disadvantaged kids behind in schools that no one cares about trying to improve. And I understand from an American perspective that sounds normal. But for me that is no way to build a society.
- mac01021 7y ago
  What do Finnish parents do if they disagree fundamentally with the educational approach of the system (like they want to do Montessori or whatever). Is there homeschooling? Does everyone have to just suck it up and use the one public school? Do Fins just never disagree about what education should look like?
- philipodonnell 7y ago
  > all kids are going to have access to the same educational opportunities, even if equality comes at the cost of quality. As part of this idea, privately funded schools are not allowed. Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools, in a place where all schools must be equal above all? Suddenly all the schools improve. (US) I sometimes wonder if fundraising by public schools (bake sales, car washes, etc) should be banned unless the raised funds are distributed evenly across all local public schools based on their headcount. I can't give money to a city or state and demand it's spent in one particular place, why should I be able to do so for a school district?

istjohn 7y ago

It's not really that hard though. It just takes money that we're unwilling to spend. Money for lead abatement, healthcare, early childhood education, summer programs, athletics, healthy school lunches, air conditioned classrooms, high-skilled and highly-paid teachers, intervention programs for at-risk youth, addiction treatment, school counselors, etc., etc. Basically, poor kids need all the stuff middle class kids take for granted. Who knew? And we can provide it to them. We just don't want to.

bzbarsky 7y ago
It's not just a matter of spending money. As a simple example, per the numbers cited at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/study_shows_huge_disparity_in.html http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud... DC public schools spend a good bit more per student that neighboring Montgomery County, MD. The schools in Montgomery County are quite a bit better in terms of most of the things you list, except perhaps addiction treatment and at-risk intervention programs (about which I can't speak usefully; I don't know much about the state of them in Montgomery County). Now DC is a pretty dysfunctional case in terms of the ineffectiveness of its spending. If I compare all the numbers being cited here to the numbers for Chicago Public Schools that https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cps-to-spend-an-additional-200-per-student-for-the-2017-18-school-year/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cps-to-spend-an-additional-20... mentions (which are easily 3x lower), it seems pretty clear to me that more money would in fact help improve CPS pretty drastically. And there are certainly lots of places in the US that are in the same situation as CPS. On the other hand, you also have the numbers in https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-student-than-any-other-us-state/ https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-stude... which has NYC schools at almost $22k per student, with somewhat mixed results. It's pretty common for suburban school districts to spend a good bit less than that with results that are comparable or better, for a variety of reasons. All of which is to say that there are some school districts where money would definitely help, some where fixing the systemic mismanagement of the large amounts of money already being spent would help more, and some where it's not clear what would help the most...
- istjohn 7y ago
  I wonder if it's not that districts are mismanaging their resources but that when you try to provide education to students who live in poor communities you must confront all the pervasive effects of that poverty. And the cost of doing so approaches the cost of any functional social safety net. From that standpoint, of course it's much more expensive per pupil to provide a quality education to impoverished students. It may cost 2X or 3X as much to give these kids the same education their privileged counterparts are getting.
  - bzbarsky 7y ago
    It's both. It definitely costs more to educate kids without support from home than it does to educate kids who do have such support, for example. And at the same time, some of the school districts involved are in fact horribly mismanaged. Throwing money at education _can_ help. It just doesn't _have_ to, unfortunately...

verisimilidude 7y ago

> the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require This is a solved problem in other countries. Finland is a good example. Their education system focuses on equality above all: all kids are going to have access to the same educational opportunities, even if equality comes at the cost of quality. As part of this idea, privately funded schools are not allowed. Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools, in a place where all schools must be equal above all? Suddenly all the schools improve. The problem isn't inherent to government in principle, but perhaps to our forms of government in America in practice.

bluthru 7y ago
>Finland is a good example. No, you need to control for demographics.
Ma8ee 7y ago
> Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools This was my greatest concerned, which unfortunately proved true, when we introduced private schools in Sweden: previously if your kid didn't get a good education you had to try to improve the school. So the efforts of the resourceful parents helped the kids with less resourceful parents. Now when people are unhappy with their kids education they just send them to a different school, leaving the disadvantaged kids behind in schools that no one cares about trying to improve. And I understand from an American perspective that sounds normal. But for me that is no way to build a society.
mac01021 7y ago
What do Finnish parents do if they disagree fundamentally with the educational approach of the system (like they want to do Montessori or whatever). Is there homeschooling? Does everyone have to just suck it up and use the one public school? Do Fins just never disagree about what education should look like?
philipodonnell 7y ago
> all kids are going to have access to the same educational opportunities, even if equality comes at the cost of quality. As part of this idea, privately funded schools are not allowed. Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools, in a place where all schools must be equal above all? Suddenly all the schools improve. (US) I sometimes wonder if fundraising by public schools (bake sales, car washes, etc) should be banned unless the raised funds are distributed evenly across all local public schools based on their headcount. I can't give money to a city or state and demand it's spent in one particular place, why should I be able to do so for a school district?