4 ms·

> In other words, for parents of private school students, the value of in-person learning is clear, and the schools are delivering it. There's nothing surprisi

> In other words, for parents of private school students, the value of in-person learning is clear, and the schools are delivering it. There's nothing surprising about that. You have a group of parents with money and a desire to educate their children in a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the necessary time to make it happen. That doesn't help much for the parents that have to send their kids to an underfunded public school in a big city.

sreque 5y ago
I think there have been enough studies now to show that the problem with most public schools in the U.S. have little or nothing to do with underfunding. Thomas Sowell's recent book, "Charter Schools and their enemies", shows that Charter schools with less funding can insanely outperform public schools they compete with in inner cities, even though the public schools have more funding per student. https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541675134 https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...
- willcipriano 5y ago
  The US spending is on a per student basis is on par with other OECD nations[0], it is incumbent upon the teachers unions and department of education to explain why they can not achieve what the rest of the world has with the same funds, not the taxpayer to throw more money onto the bonfire. [0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
  - tyoma 5y ago
    US schools serve as a de-facto provider of social services. Think free lunches and breakfast, school nurses, screening for disease/disabilities, sports and multitudes of after school activities to keep kids occupies until parents return, transportation to/from school, etc. Those services are a separate line-item i (I imagine) every other country. A better and more instructive comparison would be money spent only on instruction, adjusted for PPP and maybe student poverty.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      I can't find that data, but I doubt that a couple of minimum wage lunch ladies and a school nurse are why our schools have to cost twice as much as everywhere else. Other nations provide transportation as well, all of Europe doesn't live in areas with public transit, despite that perception. As for sports, if sports aren't moving the needle academically then we shouldn't be funding them. If other nations priotized education over sport, and got better results we should learn from them. Just throwing more money at probably won't do anything, what is likely is that they will double down on the strategies that aren't working.
      - tyoma 5y ago
        My point is that its not as simple as concluding the US wastes money and is ineffective at teaching. The schools in the US do a lot more than instruction, and work with a different set of students. We certainly could learn from what works around the world, but comparing raw numbers is simply not helpful. We can also learn from what works in different states. For instance, Massachusetts, as a state, has PISA scores that are on par with the best in the world.
        willcipriano 5y ago
        I just don't see a basis for calling them categorically underfunded. For example, New York State has the highest spending per student $24,040 and is ranked 14th in this survey[0] while Virginia is ranked fourth and only spends $12,216. Massachusetts spends $17,058 and tops the list. A honest look at the school system may reveal that some parts of it are underfunded, but it will likely also reveal parts that are overfunded. I suspect a lot of progress can be made by being better stewards of the money they currently have, and therefore suggest starting there. Ultimately any taxes come from the wallets of families supporting the children we are trying to help here, making them poorer needs to show benefit to be justified. [0]https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/5335 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/533...
- asoneth 5y ago
  I have not read Sowell's book. Do you know how he addresses the issue of self-selection? For example, with cost: Some kinds of students require orders of magnitude more resources than others due to health/behavioral/developmental/poverty-related issues. A school that is able to attract specific families or expel specific students should logically attempt to minimize the number of these kinds of students and therefore we would expect them to have significantly lower "per pupil" costs than average. Comparing such a school to one that must accept all students is an apples-to-oranges comparison. As a personal anecdote I used to manage an academic department that was highly ranked. I'm proud of the faculty and curriculum but to be perfectly frank the biggest factor in our success was that our ranking attracted top-tier applicants. At the level we were at, the differences between us and similar institutions mostly boiled down to that initial self-selection.
  - sreque 5y ago
    He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and discipline directly in the book, if I remember accurately. First, to address self-selection as a primary cause, Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't, and shows the performance gap between public and charter schools remains even when only considering students who entered the lottery. Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup and economic status. He also attempts to control for location differences by comparing schools that are co-located in the same building or are located within a small distance of each other. Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools' ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that the teachers unions recognize and are trying to undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education in public schools. To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be learned is that public schools need to be empowered to enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-wrenching, including one story of a student punching a pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning to school the next day with no imposed consequences for his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could learn in an environment like that.
handrous 5y ago
Private schools that did well with in-person learning last year could take measures public schools couldn't, and had much better compliance rates for things like masking and distancing. For instance, parents wouldn't let public schools suspend sports programs. There'd have been actual, physical violence if that'd been seriously attempted, lots of places. Private schools? Might be a thing they could do (and many did). Many public schools have to deal with kids who couldn't be trusted in outdoor classrooms, or face parent agitation when they take kids outside in anything but perfect weather (this is a weird phenomenon I've seen repeated at a couple private schools vs. public schools in the same area—the private-school goers want their kids out unless the weather's so bad they'll lose fingers to it even if they're bundled up, or there's an intense thunderstorm or something, while the public schools have been cowed into only taking kids out if the weather's quite good; I don't know what causes this). Private schools could plan better because, despite supposedly being more beholden to their paying customers then public schools are to their constituent families, in practice they seem to have an easier time saying "nope, this is how we're doing it, deal with it", for whatever reason. They didn't have to pay any mind to morons trying to strip all protective measures every time "the numbers" started to look a little better, or lose planning time & focus to misguided planning for those sorts of things. Private schools may already have had things like longer and more recesses than nearby public schools, so already spent a larger portion of the day outside—public schools have cut recess down to almost nothing, chasing those sweet, sweet test scores. Private schools also may have had both the money and the leadership to get things like ventilation improvements or other expensive measures done fast. Public schools were crippled by indecision, and various factions pushing for things to go "back to normal" ASAP, fighting any spending or policies that acknowledged this would be a problem for more than a very small number of months and trying to deal with it in those terms.
- aweiland 5y ago
  We looked at a private school, but ultimately opted for virtual K. The other thing this private school had going for it was class size. Way smaller than what public schools have to put up with.
slownews45 5y ago
The thing is, these schools in some cases do not charge a lot more than the funding allocated to the local public schools. What they do have obviously is incredibly flexibility and there really was no option in folks mind to cancel all in person learning. So they just do everything they can, small pods / cohorts, split schedules for recess, split day schedules even and all the other steps. So I wouldn't say money, but the time and decision velocity was there. Teachers WERE going to be teaching, and the admin (with teachers and parent council) basically said, how do we make this work. The secondary win was that this let parents work from home! So they could stay home in peace and quiet and avoid spreading stuff around. I'm seriously curious what the larger model of learn from home was in public schools? How do these parents work and progress vis a vis their colleagues who send their kids to in-person learning? The folks I know with kids in school actually did very well career wise, they were 100% on it for remote work, got lots done without commute or kids or if on an in-person job were 100% there (usually with an N95 mask if school demanded that). If anything, if folks were struggling you'd think in person would be even MORE critical for both parents and kids. Note that my local suburban public school has TONS of field space outside to set up some tents and outside classrooms. Some links as to what this looks like sometimes: https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside
908B64B197 5y ago
> You have a group of parents with money and a desire to educate their children in a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the necessary time to make it happen. I don't even think it's a matter of money, but you nailed it on the head with the desire part. Some public schools actually get more funding than private ones... Private schools get to filter out applicants. They only get applicants from families that are interested in education (and willing to spend a little bit more on it than average) and they are allowed to expel students that are not compliant. That significantly lightens the teacher's workload and makes it easier for them to adapt. Keep in mind in a public school classroom there will be a percentage of kids that don't want to be there and that will disrupt at much as they can no matter what. And, thanks to the Pareto rule, probably get 80% of the teacher's attention and energy. Some magnets schools manages to bypass that, but they are slowly being shamed and bullied into not doing [0]. [0] https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-announces-potential-changes-to-lowell-admissions-for-the-2021-22-school-year/ https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-announces...

sreque 5y ago

I think there have been enough studies now to show that the problem with most public schools in the U.S. have little or nothing to do with underfunding. Thomas Sowell's recent book, "Charter Schools and their enemies", shows that Charter schools with less funding can insanely outperform public schools they compete with in inner cities, even though the public schools have more funding per student. https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell/dp/1541675134 https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...

willcipriano 5y ago
The US spending is on a per student basis is on par with other OECD nations[0], it is incumbent upon the teachers unions and department of education to explain why they can not achieve what the rest of the world has with the same funds, not the taxpayer to throw more money onto the bonfire. [0]https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
- tyoma 5y ago
  US schools serve as a de-facto provider of social services. Think free lunches and breakfast, school nurses, screening for disease/disabilities, sports and multitudes of after school activities to keep kids occupies until parents return, transportation to/from school, etc. Those services are a separate line-item i (I imagine) every other country. A better and more instructive comparison would be money spent only on instruction, adjusted for PPP and maybe student poverty.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    I can't find that data, but I doubt that a couple of minimum wage lunch ladies and a school nurse are why our schools have to cost twice as much as everywhere else. Other nations provide transportation as well, all of Europe doesn't live in areas with public transit, despite that perception. As for sports, if sports aren't moving the needle academically then we shouldn't be funding them. If other nations priotized education over sport, and got better results we should learn from them. Just throwing more money at probably won't do anything, what is likely is that they will double down on the strategies that aren't working.
    - tyoma 5y ago
      My point is that its not as simple as concluding the US wastes money and is ineffective at teaching. The schools in the US do a lot more than instruction, and work with a different set of students. We certainly could learn from what works around the world, but comparing raw numbers is simply not helpful. We can also learn from what works in different states. For instance, Massachusetts, as a state, has PISA scores that are on par with the best in the world.
      - willcipriano 5y ago
        I just don't see a basis for calling them categorically underfunded. For example, New York State has the highest spending per student $24,040 and is ranked 14th in this survey[0] while Virginia is ranked fourth and only spends $12,216. Massachusetts spends $17,058 and tops the list. A honest look at the school system may reveal that some parts of it are underfunded, but it will likely also reveal parts that are overfunded. I suspect a lot of progress can be made by being better stewards of the money they currently have, and therefore suggest starting there. Ultimately any taxes come from the wallets of families supporting the children we are trying to help here, making them poorer needs to show benefit to be justified. [0]https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/5335 https://wallethub.com/edu/e/states-with-the-best-schools/533...
asoneth 5y ago
I have not read Sowell's book. Do you know how he addresses the issue of self-selection? For example, with cost: Some kinds of students require orders of magnitude more resources than others due to health/behavioral/developmental/poverty-related issues. A school that is able to attract specific families or expel specific students should logically attempt to minimize the number of these kinds of students and therefore we would expect them to have significantly lower "per pupil" costs than average. Comparing such a school to one that must accept all students is an apples-to-oranges comparison. As a personal anecdote I used to manage an academic department that was highly ranked. I'm proud of the faculty and curriculum but to be perfectly frank the biggest factor in our success was that our ranking attracted top-tier applicants. At the level we were at, the differences between us and similar institutions mostly boiled down to that initial self-selection.
- sreque 5y ago
  He addresses all of self-selection, demographics, and discipline directly in the book, if I remember accurately. First, to address self-selection as a primary cause, Sowell specifically compares the outcomes of students who won the charter school lottery versus those who didn't, and shows the performance gap between public and charter schools remains even when only considering students who entered the lottery. Second, Sowell purposely compares schools that have as similar demographics as possible, including racial makeup and economic status. He also attempts to control for location differences by comparing schools that are co-located in the same building or are located within a small distance of each other. Finally, he specifically calls out charter schools' ability to enforce stronger discipline and even expel students as a distinct competitive advantage, one that the teachers unions recognize and are trying to undermine. He also believes that relaxing discipline in the name of reducing disparate outcome among identity groups has a direct causal effect on worsened education in public schools. To me, with regards to discipline, the lesson to be learned is that public schools need to be empowered to enforce stricter discipline as well. There is no justice or fairness in allowing a small minority to disrupt the education of a willing majority. A few of the discipline-related anecdotes Sowell shares in his book are heart-wrenching, including one story of a student punching a pregnant teacher in the stomach, telling her he was going to punch the baby right out of her, and finally returning to school the next day with no imposed consequences for his violent behavior. I don't know how any student could learn in an environment like that.

handrous 5y ago

Private schools that did well with in-person learning last year could take measures public schools couldn't, and had much better compliance rates for things like masking and distancing. For instance, parents wouldn't let public schools suspend sports programs. There'd have been actual, physical violence if that'd been seriously attempted, lots of places. Private schools? Might be a thing they could do (and many did). Many public schools have to deal with kids who couldn't be trusted in outdoor classrooms, or face parent agitation when they take kids outside in anything but perfect weather (this is a weird phenomenon I've seen repeated at a couple private schools vs. public schools in the same area—the private-school goers want their kids out unless the weather's so bad they'll lose fingers to it even if they're bundled up, or there's an intense thunderstorm or something, while the public schools have been cowed into only taking kids out if the weather's quite good; I don't know what causes this). Private schools could plan better because, despite supposedly being more beholden to their paying customers then public schools are to their constituent families, in practice they seem to have an easier time saying "nope, this is how we're doing it, deal with it", for whatever reason. They didn't have to pay any mind to morons trying to strip all protective measures every time "the numbers" started to look a little better, or lose planning time & focus to misguided planning for those sorts of things. Private schools may already have had things like longer and more recesses than nearby public schools, so already spent a larger portion of the day outside—public schools have cut recess down to almost nothing, chasing those sweet, sweet test scores. Private schools also may have had both the money and the leadership to get things like ventilation improvements or other expensive measures done fast. Public schools were crippled by indecision, and various factions pushing for things to go "back to normal" ASAP, fighting any spending or policies that acknowledged this would be a problem for more than a very small number of months and trying to deal with it in those terms.

aweiland 5y ago
We looked at a private school, but ultimately opted for virtual K. The other thing this private school had going for it was class size. Way smaller than what public schools have to put up with.

slownews45 5y ago

The thing is, these schools in some cases do not charge a lot more than the funding allocated to the local public schools. What they do have obviously is incredibly flexibility and there really was no option in folks mind to cancel all in person learning. So they just do everything they can, small pods / cohorts, split schedules for recess, split day schedules even and all the other steps. So I wouldn't say money, but the time and decision velocity was there. Teachers WERE going to be teaching, and the admin (with teachers and parent council) basically said, how do we make this work. The secondary win was that this let parents work from home! So they could stay home in peace and quiet and avoid spreading stuff around. I'm seriously curious what the larger model of learn from home was in public schools? How do these parents work and progress vis a vis their colleagues who send their kids to in-person learning? The folks I know with kids in school actually did very well career wise, they were 100% on it for remote work, got lots done without commute or kids or if on an in-person job were 100% there (usually with an N95 mask if school demanded that). If anything, if folks were struggling you'd think in person would be even MORE critical for both parents and kids. Note that my local suburban public school has TONS of field space outside to set up some tents and outside classrooms. Some links as to what this looks like sometimes: https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside https://www.greenschoolyards.org/covid-learn-outside

908B64B197 5y ago

> You have a group of parents with money and a desire to educate their children in a particular way, so they went ahead and spent the necessary money and put in the necessary time to make it happen. I don't even think it's a matter of money, but you nailed it on the head with the desire part. Some public schools actually get more funding than private ones... Private schools get to filter out applicants. They only get applicants from families that are interested in education (and willing to spend a little bit more on it than average) and they are allowed to expel students that are not compliant. That significantly lightens the teacher's workload and makes it easier for them to adapt. Keep in mind in a public school classroom there will be a percentage of kids that don't want to be there and that will disrupt at much as they can no matter what. And, thanks to the Pareto rule, probably get 80% of the teacher's attention and energy. Some magnets schools manages to bypass that, but they are slowly being shamed and bullied into not doing [0]. [0] https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-announces-potential-changes-to-lowell-admissions-for-the-2021-22-school-year/ https://thelowell.org/8815/news/board-of-education-announces...