6 ms·

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach t

by dnndev 5y ago

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

Bostonian 5y ago
"We need more teachers and smaller classes." That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.
- Bostonian 5y ago
  For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - Shacklz 5y ago
    Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception. Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      That depends what you mean by "well".
  - thebigman433 5y ago
    Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country. Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.
- dnndev 5y ago
  Another approach could be: High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.
    - dnndev 5y ago
      I agree with you but we need to re-think education. The current education system is not working in general. Class rooms are over crowded and not enough teachers. A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.
      - hef19898 5y ago
        Looking at the US from central Europe, I see so much weird stuff. Like elected boards of education, at county level, that have actual power. Just why? There is so much broken with the German system (early selection of school types in 4th grade, social unfairness, lack of digitalisation), and still it is giving everyone a rather solid basic education of 9 years, one you can only opt out by leaving Germany. IMHO, this is a good thing. Same for France, Austria and most other EU countries I know of. Like healthcare, a public system is working in most developed countries. Except the US.
  - lr4444lr 5y ago
    You need some kind of VoTech and continuing Ed for people without degrees and white collar portable skills. Otherwise you get legions of disaffected populist voters when the economic tides shift against the only industry they know how to work in.
    - 5y ago
Ivdg3 5y ago
No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.
- Popegaf 5y ago
  > They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century. My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth. Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain. Better doesn't automatically mean good.
  - xwolfi 5y ago
    Wow I studied in France and live in Hong Kong. What you describe is so very close to HK where I have a daughter to raise. In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions. Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally). Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit. But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)
akomtu 5y ago
"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.
- ryty 5y ago
  They punish this skill. I was literally expelled from my high school during senior year for arguing with a teacher over her misinterpretation of something stated pretty plainly in the textbook. The teacher got furious when I stated confidently that she was wrong, and within about 15 minutes I had been taken to the principal’s office and told to never tell a teacher that they are wrong, to which I said “even if they are wrong?” and she expelled me on the spot. The expulsion was overturned about a week later but it was a terrible week for me and my parents, and I got pretty behind in my schoolwork because of it. And to be clear the problem was that the teacher was saying something different from the textbook, so this was not a subjective matter, or a question of knowledge exactly. If she had just said “ignore the textbook” it would have been fine.
  - muyuu 5y ago
    I had something similar happen to me in retrospect it was a valuable lesson
- briandear 5y ago
  It’s against their best interests to teach this. Imagine if they taught critical thinking about the Covid epidemic. The very logic unions used to keep schools closed would be unraveled if students and parents were thinking critically.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  I think you are working in the right direction, but you have to include lies that are believed by the teller, semi-lies that were honestly conceived but lose their earnestness through determined avoidance of self-questioning, and even honest but harmful mistakes.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school. All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school. Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.
- beaner 5y ago
  "It worked for me, so it must be working for most others."
- dnndev 5y ago
  “ in general.” Implies it’s not a blanket statement for all. Of course there is the exception.
- bombcar 5y ago
  “In a small town” basically covers it right there.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    That's not particularly descriptive, because the high school in my small town of 25,000 was in the middle of the LA metro area. It is most often referred to as a small town by LA locals but it's high school class alone is easily the size of a "small town" in rural areas, where you might need a car just to get to your nearest neighbor.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  >National Merit Scholar Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
diob 5y ago
We should increase teacher pay / benefits to attract better talent. At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.
- stirlo 5y ago
  I think you’ll find those parents who don’t don’t have the time to engage with their kids are working far more than 40 hours. The lucky ones are probably working 60-70 for a tech company and making bank, the unlucky ones are working multiple minimum wage jobs to just live with the basics.
  - diob 5y ago
    Definitely agree with you, going over 30 hrs a week or whatever the new full time definition would be should always cause overtime pay. There are so many loopholes to avoid overtime these days (classify employee as X, etc etc).
barry-cotter 5y ago
> We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf > The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).

by dnndev 5y ago

Bostonian 5y ago

"We need more teachers and smaller classes." That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.

Bostonian 5y ago
For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Shacklz 5y ago
  Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception. Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    That depends what you mean by "well".
- thebigman433 5y ago
  Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country. Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.
dnndev 5y ago
Another approach could be: High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.
- hef19898 5y ago
  A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.
  - dnndev 5y ago
    I agree with you but we need to re-think education. The current education system is not working in general. Class rooms are over crowded and not enough teachers. A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Looking at the US from central Europe, I see so much weird stuff. Like elected boards of education, at county level, that have actual power. Just why? There is so much broken with the German system (early selection of school types in 4th grade, social unfairness, lack of digitalisation), and still it is giving everyone a rather solid basic education of 9 years, one you can only opt out by leaving Germany. IMHO, this is a good thing. Same for France, Austria and most other EU countries I know of. Like healthcare, a public system is working in most developed countries. Except the US.
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  You need some kind of VoTech and continuing Ed for people without degrees and white collar portable skills. Otherwise you get legions of disaffected populist voters when the economic tides shift against the only industry they know how to work in.
  - 5y ago

Ivdg3 5y ago

No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.

Popegaf 5y ago
> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century. My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth. Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain. Better doesn't automatically mean good.
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Wow I studied in France and live in Hong Kong. What you describe is so very close to HK where I have a daughter to raise. In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions. Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally). Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit. But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)

akomtu 5y ago

"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.

ryty 5y ago
They punish this skill. I was literally expelled from my high school during senior year for arguing with a teacher over her misinterpretation of something stated pretty plainly in the textbook. The teacher got furious when I stated confidently that she was wrong, and within about 15 minutes I had been taken to the principal’s office and told to never tell a teacher that they are wrong, to which I said “even if they are wrong?” and she expelled me on the spot. The expulsion was overturned about a week later but it was a terrible week for me and my parents, and I got pretty behind in my schoolwork because of it. And to be clear the problem was that the teacher was saying something different from the textbook, so this was not a subjective matter, or a question of knowledge exactly. If she had just said “ignore the textbook” it would have been fine.
- muyuu 5y ago
  I had something similar happen to me in retrospect it was a valuable lesson
briandear 5y ago
It’s against their best interests to teach this. Imagine if they taught critical thinking about the Covid epidemic. The very logic unions used to keep schools closed would be unraveled if students and parents were thinking critically.
whatshisface 5y ago
I think you are working in the right direction, but you have to include lies that are believed by the teller, semi-lies that were honestly conceived but lose their earnestness through determined avoidance of self-questioning, and even honest but harmful mistakes.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school. All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school. Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.

beaner 5y ago
"It worked for me, so it must be working for most others."
dnndev 5y ago
“ in general.” Implies it’s not a blanket statement for all. Of course there is the exception.
bombcar 5y ago
“In a small town” basically covers it right there.
- akiselev 5y ago
  That's not particularly descriptive, because the high school in my small town of 25,000 was in the middle of the LA metro area. It is most often referred to as a small town by LA locals but it's high school class alone is easily the size of a "small town" in rural areas, where you might need a car just to get to your nearest neighbor.
paulpauper 5y ago
>National Merit Scholar Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.
- saagarjha 5y ago

diob 5y ago

We should increase teacher pay / benefits to attract better talent. At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.

stirlo 5y ago
I think you’ll find those parents who don’t don’t have the time to engage with their kids are working far more than 40 hours. The lucky ones are probably working 60-70 for a tech company and making bank, the unlucky ones are working multiple minimum wage jobs to just live with the basics.
- diob 5y ago
  Definitely agree with you, going over 30 hrs a week or whatever the new full time definition would be should always cause overtime pay. There are so many loopholes to avoid overtime these days (classify employee as X, etc etc).

barry-cotter 5y ago

> We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled. https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf > The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).