5 ms·

You're confused that people have one set of standards for the providers of trash removal and another set of standards for people authorized to commit state-sanc

You're confused that people have one set of standards for the providers of trash removal and another set of standards for people authorized to commit state-sanctioned murder? The two are kind of distinct.

darawk 6y ago
The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.
- dlp211 6y ago
  The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.
  - darawk 6y ago
    That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      You can't take the stats of a charter school vs its district peers and extrapolate that to the state level. It's also notable that Massachusetts doesn't have a recent report. I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point: o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.
      - darawk 6y ago
        I think it's more about options. Charter schools have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, which means their outcomes are likely to be more variable. Some will be better than traditional schools, some will be worse. But over time, that freedom to experiment should converge to an overall higher standard of education. At least, that's the theory, but the data seem consistent with that so far.
- fredophile 6y ago
  Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.
  - darawk 6y ago
    This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.
    - gbrown 6y ago
      Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.
      - darawk 6y ago
        It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.
    - fredophile 6y ago
      Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky. I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.

darawk 6y ago

The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are to be found.

dlp211 6y ago
The best k-12 schools in the US are in states that have teachers unions, so maybe go rethink your hypothesis.
- darawk 6y ago
  That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter schools from the brick and mortar.
  - dlp211 6y ago
    You can't take the stats of a charter school vs its district peers and extrapolate that to the state level. It's also notable that Massachusetts doesn't have a recent report. I also took a look at the 2019 Washington (my state) press release with the following bullet point: o School level findings identified several charter schools with significantly positive impacts, as much as 165 and 189 more days of learning in reading and math, respectively, compared to the learning they would have realized in traditional public schools. Conversely, some charters significantly underperformed their local school options by as much as 106 and 83 fewer days of learning in reading and math, respectively I'm not saying that charter schools aren't useful, what I am willing to say is that charter schools provide a good solution to a particular problem that has more to do school quality being tied to local tax revenue than unions.
    - darawk 6y ago
      I think it's more about options. Charter schools have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, which means their outcomes are likely to be more variable. Some will be better than traditional schools, some will be worse. But over time, that freedom to experiment should converge to an overall higher standard of education. At least, that's the theory, but the data seem consistent with that so far.
fredophile 6y ago
Do you have any sources to back this up? My understanding is that non-unionized groups like charter schools do not outperform public schools. Many charter schools appear to outperform but once you account for the fact that they can choose their students, removing all of the low performers and putting them in the public system, they no longer show a benefit.
- darawk 6y ago
  This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies You do want to read carefully, because Charter schools are often mixed by 'online' and 'brick and mortar'. When you aggregate these two, Charter schools as a group tend to match or underperform traditional public schools. But this is primarily because online charter schools do substantially worse. When you disaggregate the brick-and-mortar charters, they usually overperform traditional public schools, though not totally uniformly. And these studies do try to do matched control of students, to account for that selection effect.
  - gbrown 6y ago
    Can you point to anything specific that addresses the objection raised? Nobody contests that brick and mortar charter schools have higher performance - the issues come down to the resources they receive and the fact that they have unique abilities to shape their admission.
    - darawk 6y ago
      It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble with exactly how they do this, of course.
  - fredophile 6y ago
    Thank you for the link. I agree that this is a very politicized issue and that can make finding objective info tricky. I checked out the first case study and it looks like you are correct that the brick and mortar charter schools significantly outperform the online ones. However, at least in that study, the brick and mortar charters slightly outperformed public schools in reading but underperformed in math. However, I don't believe these differences were statistically significant. While there probably are some states where charter schools outperform they seem to only perform the same as public schools in South Carolina. To me this doesn't add much weight to the argument that unions lead to worse teaching outcomes. I will also say that I'm not an expert, my cursory reading of one report doesn't change that fact, and I'm definitely open to changing my opinion on this in the future but I don't have the time or interest to read all of the reports in the link.