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I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents. Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.

lalaland1125 5y ago
This was the explicit and intended result of No Child Left Behind. Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  If we're being honest, no one was willing to work at or fund helping kids excel. It's just too huge of a problem.
sqrt17 5y ago
> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot. It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids. Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".
- MomoXenosaga 5y ago
  In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to. You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
  - neartheplain 5y ago
    There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% white in a county that is 17% Asian and 62% white [0][1]. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, another high-performing public magnet school, is 74% Asian while Asian residents make up just 14% of the city's population [2][3]. In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers. And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students: >What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other. >Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City [4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cost-788672 https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos... [5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-york-high-schools-stuyvesant-brooklyn-bronx/562772/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...
GGfpc 5y ago
The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school. To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
  - rmah 5y ago
    Very little? In my town's school district, something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". Who make up less than 5% of the student body. They get a LOT of attention and extra help. As far as I can tell though, it doesn't help much.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". ... Much of that money and effort is simply wasted if teachers aren't going to adopt effective approaches towards teaching and helping these kids.
      - throwaway210222 5y ago
        0% should be wasted on the incorrigible. And yes, they exist.
        5y ago
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
* remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning.* This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong. There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.
- TX0098812 5y ago
  > This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    OP mentioned not “showing up”, not “putting in effort”, not doing homework and disruptiveness as indications that a child is a loser and not worth the resources it would take to make them productive adults. All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. I haven’t read all the replies yet but I’m surprised at the lack of reactions to OP classifying some children as losers because of their performance at school.
    - hn8788 5y ago
      > All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. That's not true, some kids are just shitheads and don't feel like listening to anyone or doing what they're told. Personal responsibility has to come into play at some point, you can't just blame every problem on external factors.
      - 5y ago
LatteLazy 5y ago
I think this is the case everywhere. Here in the UK they wasted huge efforts trying to turn Es into Ds and no one gave a shit as long as you got a C.
TX0098812 5y ago
Where I went to school, they put all of the effort into the kids who were failing and if you were doing well, you got no help because hey you seem to be doing ok. Results? The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  There are also many, less intuitive reasons why continued commitment over time on the student's part is critically important. A student who is not sufficiently committed to her education might manage to "cram" for a test (often with strenuous, even painful effort!) and perhaps pass it, but then not put any attention into reviewing what she has learned, which sets her up to fail later when she will be expected to be familiar with that content and tackle new material that depends on it. It can be a self-sustaining cycle of failure.
kace91 5y ago
Honestly, I think viewing it as an exclusive choice is harmful. Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.
- bargle0 5y ago
  Some of these failing school systems (Baltimore, MD & Prince George’s County, MD) have some of the highest budgets per pupil in the country. The problem isn’t money.
  - zbentley 5y ago
    I'd be interested in how those budgets are broken down. Are those schools spending the money on finding the best teachers, counselors, mentors, etc. for their struggling students? Or are they spending it in more questionable areas? That's a genuinely curious question. I haven't researched any specifics about those schools or how they use their money. It's possible for a vicious cycle to develop between waste/corruption in a school system and poor academic performance, wherein additional money doesn't help improve outcomes. That doesn't mean that withholding resources is the solution; rather, it means that a more fundamental restructuring than American municipal governments may be comfortable with is in order.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    Highest budgets still aren't very high though. It's anchored low.
  - kace91 5y ago
    I think numbers might lie a bit there. If the function of education is to provide an even starting point for kids regardless of their personal environment, it stands to reason that in places where those personal environments are worse you'd need brutal amounts of resources, since you'll indirectly be covering for parents' neglect, psychological issues, and other factors that should have been handled somewhere else but are being stuck in the education budget. If you see it under that scope, absolute numbers might not tell you much.
hef19898 5y ago
> the effort in takes to turn those kids into someone worthwhile Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now. Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!
- nikanj 5y ago
  I believe a large portion of HN visitor got their lunch money stolen and toys broken by these loser kids. Bullied kids grow up to despise bullies, and bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with being a poor student
  - hef19898 5y ago
    The worst bullies I saw where from well off families. Still weren't the brightest, but that had definitely nothing to do with social circumstances. In fact, those socially handicapped kids were those being bullied. That was on a German Gymnasium, so on the road to higher education. Obviously, social dynamics will be different in lower tier schools. I do have the impression that we are not discussing those here. Also, being bullied is a poor excuse of becoming a bully yourself.
- austincheney 5y ago
  A productive education system should dedicate resources to students equally with voluntary options for students who perform outside the norm. That means not disproportionately dedicating resources to students who fail aside from tutoring outside class. Some students just deserve to fail. It is better find that out early instead of lying to children that everything is great and kicking the can down the road to the shock of adulthood. Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.
jl2718 5y ago
The theory behind this is NOT that the poor students will become productive and valuable members of society. It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I'm going to repeat some stuff I said in a sibling comment, but OP mentions students who actually set $#!+ on fire at their school, and the only semblance of correctional action for this serious, criminal behavior was five days(!) of in-school suspension. No mention of police being seriously involved, as would be entirely proper given these circumstances. This is emphatically not how you'd try to save these kids from a life of crime; it has the exact opposite effect.
  - jl2718 5y ago
    I’m not sure that is exactly true. I’m not personally concerned with agents of chaos, but I am concerned with those that would victimize others to get what they want. I don’t know how to stop that. Some say the option of stable employment helps, so they get pushed through to graduation. I would personally choose a different path, such as holding public trial as in the real world, with academic punishments, and juvie if they don’t comply. But it’s probably far more complicated than I imagine.
exolymph 5y ago
The word "worthwhile" was a poor choice — you're probably intending to talk about economics, about the price someone's labor might justify in the future. But it sounds like you're talking about transcendent moral value, because that's what we associate with the term "worth." Hopefully you don't actually mean to say that lesser academic ability equates to lesser import as a human being.
vmception 5y ago
That’s because there is greater ROI now in the population being productive. There is no utility in marginalizing anyone anymore. The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all. If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.
walledstance 5y ago
I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities. These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile." Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves. I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems. I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. :Continued below:
- walledstance 5y ago
  Continued from above: Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.
galfarragem 5y ago
This is the less political correct top HN comment I see in years. There is still hope.

lalaland1125 5y ago

This was the explicit and intended result of No Child Left Behind. Schools were only given incentives to make kids pass, not to help them excel.

ethbr0 5y ago
If we're being honest, no one was willing to work at or fund helping kids excel. It's just too huge of a problem.

sqrt17 5y ago

> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot. It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids. Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".

MomoXenosaga 5y ago
In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to. You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.
- neartheplain 5y ago
  There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% white in a county that is 17% Asian and 62% white [0][1]. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, another high-performing public magnet school, is 74% Asian while Asian residents make up just 14% of the city's population [2][3]. In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers. And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students: >What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other. >Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_for_Science_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City [4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cost-788672 https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos... [5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-york-high-schools-stuyvesant-brooklyn-bronx/562772/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...

GGfpc 5y ago

The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school. To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.

zozbot234 5y ago
> The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that "this segment is by its nature low ROI". It's not 'natural', it's pure dysfunction.)
- rmah 5y ago
  Very little? In my town's school district, something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". Who make up less than 5% of the student body. They get a LOT of attention and extra help. As far as I can tell though, it doesn't help much.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". ... Much of that money and effort is simply wasted if teachers aren't going to adopt effective approaches towards teaching and helping these kids.
    - throwaway210222 5y ago
      0% should be wasted on the incorrigible. And yes, they exist.
      - 5y ago

Broken_Hippo 5y ago

* remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning.* This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? I know that was the attitude of the schools of yesteryear - but they were wrong. There are lots of reasons for remedial classes: Dyslexia, for example. A kid might have anxiety issues that make finishing homework near impossible: ADHD is a real thing that folks struggle with. All of these can be worked through - but back in history, they would be sent away to rot. Lots of them are bright kids, and a fair number of them can be a future surgeon or researcher.

TX0098812 5y ago
> This just isn't true. Do you honestly believe that a kid with a learning disability is simply not trying? You injected the words "learning disability". That's not that OP said.
- nefitty 5y ago
  OP mentioned not “showing up”, not “putting in effort”, not doing homework and disruptiveness as indications that a child is a loser and not worth the resources it would take to make them productive adults. All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. I haven’t read all the replies yet but I’m surprised at the lack of reactions to OP classifying some children as losers because of their performance at school.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    > All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. That's not true, some kids are just shitheads and don't feel like listening to anyone or doing what they're told. Personal responsibility has to come into play at some point, you can't just blame every problem on external factors.
    - 5y ago

LatteLazy 5y ago

I think this is the case everywhere. Here in the UK they wasted huge efforts trying to turn Es into Ds and no one gave a shit as long as you got a C.

TX0098812 5y ago

Where I went to school, they put all of the effort into the kids who were failing and if you were doing well, you got no help because hey you seem to be doing ok. Results? The kids who were failing still failed because no matter how much teachers do, it's still up to them to study.

zozbot234 5y ago
There are also many, less intuitive reasons why continued commitment over time on the student's part is critically important. A student who is not sufficiently committed to her education might manage to "cram" for a test (often with strenuous, even painful effort!) and perhaps pass it, but then not put any attention into reviewing what she has learned, which sets her up to fail later when she will be expected to be familiar with that content and tackle new material that depends on it. It can be a self-sustaining cycle of failure.

kace91 5y ago

Honestly, I think viewing it as an exclusive choice is harmful. Schools need resources for both kinds of students, and if they have to choose who gets the attention they are simply underfunded.

bargle0 5y ago
Some of these failing school systems (Baltimore, MD & Prince George’s County, MD) have some of the highest budgets per pupil in the country. The problem isn’t money.
- zbentley 5y ago
  I'd be interested in how those budgets are broken down. Are those schools spending the money on finding the best teachers, counselors, mentors, etc. for their struggling students? Or are they spending it in more questionable areas? That's a genuinely curious question. I haven't researched any specifics about those schools or how they use their money. It's possible for a vicious cycle to develop between waste/corruption in a school system and poor academic performance, wherein additional money doesn't help improve outcomes. That doesn't mean that withholding resources is the solution; rather, it means that a more fundamental restructuring than American municipal governments may be comfortable with is in order.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Highest budgets still aren't very high though. It's anchored low.
- kace91 5y ago
  I think numbers might lie a bit there. If the function of education is to provide an even starting point for kids regardless of their personal environment, it stands to reason that in places where those personal environments are worse you'd need brutal amounts of resources, since you'll indirectly be covering for parents' neglect, psychological issues, and other factors that should have been handled somewhere else but are being stuck in the education budget. If you see it under that scope, absolute numbers might not tell you much.

hef19898 5y ago

> the effort in takes to turn those kids into someone worthwhile Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now. Let me guess, your kids definitely fall into the future researcher category, don't they? Just imagine, these other kids have parents too!

nikanj 5y ago
I believe a large portion of HN visitor got their lunch money stolen and toys broken by these loser kids. Bullied kids grow up to despise bullies, and bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with being a poor student
- hef19898 5y ago
  The worst bullies I saw where from well off families. Still weren't the brightest, but that had definitely nothing to do with social circumstances. In fact, those socially handicapped kids were those being bullied. That was on a German Gymnasium, so on the road to higher education. Obviously, social dynamics will be different in lower tier schools. I do have the impression that we are not discussing those here. Also, being bullied is a poor excuse of becoming a bully yourself.
austincheney 5y ago
A productive education system should dedicate resources to students equally with voluntary options for students who perform outside the norm. That means not disproportionately dedicating resources to students who fail aside from tutoring outside class. Some students just deserve to fail. It is better find that out early instead of lying to children that everything is great and kicking the can down the road to the shock of adulthood. Teachers are not parents. They have limited time and resources to devote to a specified area of instruction divided amongst a number of students. Some parents are extreme failures in their responsibility which performs the greatest disservice to a child. This is how I ended up with a foster child with emotional trauma. Teachers must not be expected to perform the job of a parent just because some parents are so horribly bad at being parents.

jl2718 5y ago

The theory behind this is NOT that the poor students will become productive and valuable members of society. It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.

zozbot234 5y ago
I'm going to repeat some stuff I said in a sibling comment, but OP mentions students who actually set $#!+ on fire at their school, and the only semblance of correctional action for this serious, criminal behavior was five days(!) of in-school suspension. No mention of police being seriously involved, as would be entirely proper given these circumstances. This is emphatically not how you'd try to save these kids from a life of crime; it has the exact opposite effect.
- jl2718 5y ago
  I’m not sure that is exactly true. I’m not personally concerned with agents of chaos, but I am concerned with those that would victimize others to get what they want. I don’t know how to stop that. Some say the option of stable employment helps, so they get pushed through to graduation. I would personally choose a different path, such as holding public trial as in the real world, with academic punishments, and juvie if they don’t comply. But it’s probably far more complicated than I imagine.

exolymph 5y ago

The word "worthwhile" was a poor choice — you're probably intending to talk about economics, about the price someone's labor might justify in the future. But it sounds like you're talking about transcendent moral value, because that's what we associate with the term "worth." Hopefully you don't actually mean to say that lesser academic ability equates to lesser import as a human being.

vmception 5y ago

That’s because there is greater ROI now in the population being productive. There is no utility in marginalizing anyone anymore. The US attracts talent whether they were educated here or not. The US got to that place with poor schools while only heterosexual cisgender men were working. While the rest of the marginalized population was a drag on society and its security as they fought for scraps. The US becoming more inclusive in all facets amplifies its society much more, it doesnt mean turning any troubled youth into a surgeon or researcher. It means giving them a baseline to be productive at all. If you want your child to be doing something else, look elsewhere.

walledstance 5y ago

I have taught for multiple years in a southern state in the US within Behavior Support units for the "emotionally disturbed or distracted students." These classes range from neurotypical, ADHD, autism spectrum, to learning disabilities. These students being the so called "bullies and disruptive kids" many people in this thread have directly judged as poor ROI and "not worthwhile." Many of these comments trivialize the complex issues surrounding the school system. They widdle down the problem to "lazy teachers", "not worthwhile" students, and "teacher unions" as a few examples. These comments also ignore contributing factors that happen outside the school system, such as homelife, cultural and societal shifts, economic and technological gaps, and policy changes, which in effect directly impact how the school system behaves. I'm chiming in to this discussion because I have first hand experience from me and my peers, troves of data collected on students' performances (not anonymized, so I can't dispense it), funding resources and student allocation receipts, and ample secondary resources from my peers that mostly corroborate the experiences many teachers are forced into within poorly managed and maintained school systems. I think overall the school system is an easy lumbering target to hit with our worries and hatreds. Corrupt or inept school boards, poorly functioning officials and administration making ineffective changes that seem to directly or indirectly impact students' lives and their potential future prospects. Teachers who are "lazy and uninterested" who are "unwilling to work harder at representing students within a fading, failing American school system." I think many of these comments come from not understanding school systems' inner workings, and more importantly, not knowing what the inside of a classroom is like on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis. :Continued below:

walledstance 5y ago
Continued from above: Let's start at the top with administration. I'm not going to speak in detail on administration actions because my expertise is within the classroom and working the policy decisions made by school boards and administration into my daily lessons. Over the course of my career as an educator (27 years) I have had 16 different principals. Teachers call this the "admin churn." This is when budgeting experts and superintendents look at collected data on schools and make decisions about what schools need from a budgetary and grade performance standpoint. Out of this comes the decisions to move principals and assistant principals around the county to "help increase or stabilize" schools' performances. This leadership churn is devastating to morale. The devastation comes from having to relearn an entirely new leadership's expectations and personality. This churn can happen at any time, the beginning, middle or the end of the year. This churn has a deleterious effect on teachers' morale because teachers who settle-in and get their classes following the codes and ethics of the school are suddenly given new guidelines to teach students. These guidelines, much of the time, upend the previous guidelines already established in the classroom. That means curriculum must be placed to the side and the new school guidelines are taught. It's important to note that teaching guidelines is not as simple as telling students "these are the new guidelines. Please follow them." Instead it can take weeks or months, depending on grade level, to incorporate new guidelines into a classroom. This is due to how children and young adults ingest information. This accounts for mostly all students, including neuro-divergent students. All information must be practiced and students reminded hundreds, possibly thousands of times as a group or as individuals before information becomes concrete. A fantastic example of concretififaction are the mask mandates we recently went through in our country. Getting students, whether in highschool, middle, or elementary to wear masks required a bunch of practice and reminders. In my county, admin changed the rules partially through the school year at the behest of the school board's policy decisions. At one point students in my county had to wear face shields and masks, then just face shields, then just face masks, then back to both. All this change paused academics mostly so that the mask mandates could be incorporated into the classroom. This is a small example of how policy decisions from the top directly impact teachers and students, yet these same policy decisions can have a consequential effect on important structures like school lunches, students grades, teacher teaching styles, and funding allocation.

galfarragem 5y ago

This is the less political correct top HN comment I see in years. There is still hope.