12 ms·

How on earth do we de-escalate from here? I feel that in the US it is impossible to summon the political willpower to make it HARDER to graduate HS or go to col

How on earth do we de-escalate from here? I feel that in the US it is impossible to summon the political willpower to make it HARDER to graduate HS or go to college, even if these things would make society better off. My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however.

jimbob45 5y ago
US HS has an impossibly high skillcap atm to the point of absurdity. One does not simply graduate US HS and come out as an equal to every other HS graduate. The meta these days is to become the most accomplished HS graduate achievable.
- asdff 5y ago
  Only if you are going for the big guns in college admits. Everyone making ok grades gets into some state school. Might not be the main state school campus but its easy to transfer in from satellite campuses usually.
adventured 5y ago
> How on earth do we de-escalate from here? You increase the chances to succeed at the same time you make it more difficult, to overwhelm that aspect. Reduce the binary outcome slightly so it's not just a cycle of fail and be thrown / throw yourself to the wolves (dropout). Dramatically increase vocational education training. Shift to a year-round school system. So you don't fail and abandon. Instead, you never stop until you succeed. High school et al stops being N year pegs/separations that you must pass each of to move on annually (start year / pass or fail / break / next year). Instead it's year-round, fluid, continual. You are failing at this thing, continue until you are not, no break, no year markers. The rigid year system is largely bullshit, it's an exceptionally idiotic approach. It's overly simplistic and lacks the nuance of an individual's context and needs.
- uejfiweun 5y ago
  I love these ideas and I agree with them for the most part. But I am pessimistic about US society's capacity to make such far reaching changes to a system that has largely stayed the same for almost 100 years. There are just too many forces pulling these government officials too many ways - the best we will get is some compromise that satisfies nobody. That's why I say we should move to a more free-market based solution. It would be EASY for a private organization to completely revamp the way the school year structure works! I went to public school myself, but I believe I've heard of such "progressive" or "nontraditional" private schools that offer different structures than the standard "grade" approach. Of course, the issue with private schools is cost, but I think direct subsidies a la stimulus checks as well as tax cuts could help. Of course, this would cause mass disruption in the education labor market, but the nuances of that escape me.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    I went to a private school in France, a small one in a smallish town, and I dont really understand why we have public schools. The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams. It may not be fit for everyone, but now that I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, I dont feel like I m being abused by deadlines, financial objectives, disappointement on failures, high reward on success, expectation that I do more than the minimum etc. But in France, saying these is an anathema, people can get insane we encourage kids to excel, in silly things such as just being fluent in English, useful in Math, generally aware of physics, careful about historical precedents or able to follow a discussion on philosophy. And it's not even considering accessories like understanding Latin etymology or never making a spelling mistake in French. We may see education like a sort or right, that happens given enough tax money thrown at schools, but it feels to me like a mindset and a duty: we must understand what's happening around us and we must make our children useful. Too bad if it's a little bit hard some days, but that's this or we whine all our lives the rich are eating OUR cake, when all we ever did was being born and claiming equality.
    - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
wyldfire 5y ago
Public education is one of those rare positive externalities. I think it would be a mistake to abandon it. If we wanted to succeed here, we would likely need to invest more money to hire more or superior teachers that could work individually with these students that struggle to meet the requirements. The worst part would be that even with that investment it may not even be enough. Some portion of the students who don't achieve are not interested in excelling, and individual attention may not help much there.
- brightball 5y ago
  Public education is a net good but the implementation model of that education is what’s such a problem right now. There’s a reason so many more kids are home schooled now than ever before and it’s a complete lack of confidence in public schools. Private school waiting lists are a mile long.
  - JPKab 5y ago
    I'm a parent of two kids and I couldn't agree more. I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite. I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in private school. They get less than half the money per student that the public school system I live in gets, and are vastly more efficient. The operations, the instructors, it's all just run correctly. When my daughter was still in a public elementary school I walked in one day to try to get her iPad fixed when they were doing full remote learning due to the pandemic. There was a large meeting taking place amongst all the staff. None of them had bothered to return my calls which is why I had to go in person. They looked like they were having a party because I didn't see any work getting done. At the end of the day it's a government school. Name a single government agency that is efficient with their money. Name a government agency that's good at hiring, or keeping good talent. We should just do a voucher system and let the private sector deal with this. As a taxpayer I'm deeply resentful of having my money get taken from me and given to unionized teachers who refused to work for a full year and then had the nerve to take summer vacation as if it had been a normal year. These were the same folks who were put at the front of the line for vaccinations independent of their age groups. And then they proceeded to act like they were still in danger and couldn't open schools.
fennecfoxen 5y ago
New Orleans post-Katrina style , that’s how. Takes political will though.
- KMag 5y ago
  I don't have enough context here. The first search result I found disputes claims of post-Katrina New Orleans schools doing better than similar cities[0], but maybe that's a biased sounce. Do you have some links and maybe some elaboration on the point you're trying to make? From my short reading, it sounds like the narrative is that the disaster gave both sides the political cover they needed to make the concessions they've long known they needed, and allowed effective reform to happen. Is that what you're suggesting? [0] https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-after-katrina https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-aft...
  - truffdog 5y ago
    AFT is definitely biased- one of the big things they did post Katrina is union busting. It's interesting their article doesn't include the normal dispute of the post-Katrina improvements, the fact that the cohort of students is very different.
bsder 5y ago
> How on earth do we de-escalate from here? The SAT provides a hard deadline which prevents you from de-escalating high school. College provides a soft deadline which prevents you from de-escalating as getting a degree before you run out of money is an employment filter. You have to remove college as an employment filter in order to de-escalate the whole thing.
- mjevans 5y ago
  College is a filter because you don't get it for free * (usually) and to pass must show up on time and do the work. High school _could_ become such a filter if a national standard were developed and _enforced_. Education shouldn't stop until that is met or someone ends up on mental disability status. More help still should be provided if the external environment isn't conducive to success. Such a basic qualifying education should be a human right, further the right of anything which can think. Graduation from that filter could be a requirement to being a productive and full member of society. I _still_ disagree, that under the exact circumstances outlined above, where the right to that education and the fulfillment of it's mandate are a per-requisite, in that set of circumstances graduating could be a requirement to vote. Proof that someone is a functioning member of society (because otherwise they'd be a pre-adult protected class of society).
deepsun 5y ago
Well, before governments got into education, most people were happy living illiterate.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"people were happy living illiterate" And you of course have all encompassing stats to prove that they were happy. Government education allowed people with limited financial means to give a chance to their kids at least. Problem is not the government education. Problem is that thanks to political games the priorities got completely fucked up. The goal should be to actually educate people not to make sure that everyone passes.
  - deepsun 5y ago
    I meant that people often resisted literacy, or at least didn't see any use of it.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Even if that were true, that half would still mop the floor intellectually with the type of fool that would write a statement like the one above.
- endominus 5y ago
  > Public schools work. You can’t deny that. Per the GP, in their area "the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%". That sounds like an absolute denial that public schools are working, unless your definition of a working school includes ones that don't teach the majority to read and comprehend mathematics at an adult level. Spending on schools is higher than it's ever been, and the results are flat-lining - and have been for decades. See [0]. Perhaps the issue is something that throwing money at them won't fix? Perhaps it behooves us to look deeper and see if the education system is performing what we need it to do. [0]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/brat-us-school-spending-375-percent-over-30-years-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...
  - danaris 5y ago
    Some public schools that we have right now aren't working well (ie, the implementation is a problem, not the idea), because we have, for decades, been siphoning money away from them to fund private schools, refusing to provide funding for necessary materials (textbooks, classroom supplies, building maintenance, desks & chairs that don't break when you sit in them), underpaying and under-hiring teachers so that many people who want to go into teaching feel that they can't because it's unaffordable... Just "throwing money at them" isn't going to work, no, because the money needs to go to the right places. But there are so many places where it's pretty clear that extra money will make a huge difference that arguing that schools are overfunded—or that "public schools don't work"—is just ludicrous.
    - 5y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however. I don't think that's a good idea. Privatization has a way of making many things worse and more expensive. I can't really see how privatization wouldn't increase the gap between poorer students and students from more well-off families, for instance.

jimbob45 5y ago

US HS has an impossibly high skillcap atm to the point of absurdity. One does not simply graduate US HS and come out as an equal to every other HS graduate. The meta these days is to become the most accomplished HS graduate achievable.

asdff 5y ago
Only if you are going for the big guns in college admits. Everyone making ok grades gets into some state school. Might not be the main state school campus but its easy to transfer in from satellite campuses usually.

adventured 5y ago

> How on earth do we de-escalate from here? You increase the chances to succeed at the same time you make it more difficult, to overwhelm that aspect. Reduce the binary outcome slightly so it's not just a cycle of fail and be thrown / throw yourself to the wolves (dropout). Dramatically increase vocational education training. Shift to a year-round school system. So you don't fail and abandon. Instead, you never stop until you succeed. High school et al stops being N year pegs/separations that you must pass each of to move on annually (start year / pass or fail / break / next year). Instead it's year-round, fluid, continual. You are failing at this thing, continue until you are not, no break, no year markers. The rigid year system is largely bullshit, it's an exceptionally idiotic approach. It's overly simplistic and lacks the nuance of an individual's context and needs.

uejfiweun 5y ago
I love these ideas and I agree with them for the most part. But I am pessimistic about US society's capacity to make such far reaching changes to a system that has largely stayed the same for almost 100 years. There are just too many forces pulling these government officials too many ways - the best we will get is some compromise that satisfies nobody. That's why I say we should move to a more free-market based solution. It would be EASY for a private organization to completely revamp the way the school year structure works! I went to public school myself, but I believe I've heard of such "progressive" or "nontraditional" private schools that offer different structures than the standard "grade" approach. Of course, the issue with private schools is cost, but I think direct subsidies a la stimulus checks as well as tax cuts could help. Of course, this would cause mass disruption in the education labor market, but the nuances of that escape me.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  I went to a private school in France, a small one in a smallish town, and I dont really understand why we have public schools. The incentive to succeed starts at parents having to pay, ending with the students being quite aggressively challenged to actually deliver on exams. It may not be fit for everyone, but now that I work in an investment bank in Hong Kong, I dont feel like I m being abused by deadlines, financial objectives, disappointement on failures, high reward on success, expectation that I do more than the minimum etc. But in France, saying these is an anathema, people can get insane we encourage kids to excel, in silly things such as just being fluent in English, useful in Math, generally aware of physics, careful about historical precedents or able to follow a discussion on philosophy. And it's not even considering accessories like understanding Latin etymology or never making a spelling mistake in French. We may see education like a sort or right, that happens given enough tax money thrown at schools, but it feels to me like a mindset and a duty: we must understand what's happening around us and we must make our children useful. Too bad if it's a little bit hard some days, but that's this or we whine all our lives the rich are eating OUR cake, when all we ever did was being born and claiming equality.
  - adgjlsfhk1 5y ago

wyldfire 5y ago

Public education is one of those rare positive externalities. I think it would be a mistake to abandon it. If we wanted to succeed here, we would likely need to invest more money to hire more or superior teachers that could work individually with these students that struggle to meet the requirements. The worst part would be that even with that investment it may not even be enough. Some portion of the students who don't achieve are not interested in excelling, and individual attention may not help much there.

brightball 5y ago
Public education is a net good but the implementation model of that education is what’s such a problem right now. There’s a reason so many more kids are home schooled now than ever before and it’s a complete lack of confidence in public schools. Private school waiting lists are a mile long.
- JPKab 5y ago
  I'm a parent of two kids and I couldn't agree more. I went to mostly black and poor public schools my entire childhood. Back then there were a few teachers who clearly didn't care and were never held accountable. Most of the teachers were pretty good though. It's increasingly shifted towards the opposite. I was blown away by how pathetically run my children's public schools are here in Colorado so I put them both in private school. They get less than half the money per student that the public school system I live in gets, and are vastly more efficient. The operations, the instructors, it's all just run correctly. When my daughter was still in a public elementary school I walked in one day to try to get her iPad fixed when they were doing full remote learning due to the pandemic. There was a large meeting taking place amongst all the staff. None of them had bothered to return my calls which is why I had to go in person. They looked like they were having a party because I didn't see any work getting done. At the end of the day it's a government school. Name a single government agency that is efficient with their money. Name a government agency that's good at hiring, or keeping good talent. We should just do a voucher system and let the private sector deal with this. As a taxpayer I'm deeply resentful of having my money get taken from me and given to unionized teachers who refused to work for a full year and then had the nerve to take summer vacation as if it had been a normal year. These were the same folks who were put at the front of the line for vaccinations independent of their age groups. And then they proceeded to act like they were still in danger and couldn't open schools.

fennecfoxen 5y ago

New Orleans post-Katrina style , that’s how. Takes political will though.

KMag 5y ago
I don't have enough context here. The first search result I found disputes claims of post-Katrina New Orleans schools doing better than similar cities[0], but maybe that's a biased sounce. Do you have some links and maybe some elaboration on the point you're trying to make? From my short reading, it sounds like the narrative is that the disaster gave both sides the political cover they needed to make the concessions they've long known they needed, and allowed effective reform to happen. Is that what you're suggesting? [0] https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-after-katrina https://www.aft.org/news/truth-about-new-orleans-schools-aft...
- truffdog 5y ago
  AFT is definitely biased- one of the big things they did post Katrina is union busting. It's interesting their article doesn't include the normal dispute of the post-Katrina improvements, the fact that the cohort of students is very different.

bsder 5y ago

> How on earth do we de-escalate from here? The SAT provides a hard deadline which prevents you from de-escalating high school. College provides a soft deadline which prevents you from de-escalating as getting a degree before you run out of money is an employment filter. You have to remove college as an employment filter in order to de-escalate the whole thing.

mjevans 5y ago
College is a filter because you don't get it for free * (usually) and to pass must show up on time and do the work. High school _could_ become such a filter if a national standard were developed and _enforced_. Education shouldn't stop until that is met or someone ends up on mental disability status. More help still should be provided if the external environment isn't conducive to success. Such a basic qualifying education should be a human right, further the right of anything which can think. Graduation from that filter could be a requirement to being a productive and full member of society. I _still_ disagree, that under the exact circumstances outlined above, where the right to that education and the fulfillment of it's mandate are a per-requisite, in that set of circumstances graduating could be a requirement to vote. Proof that someone is a functioning member of society (because otherwise they'd be a pre-adult protected class of society).

deepsun 5y ago

Well, before governments got into education, most people were happy living illiterate.

FpUser 5y ago
>"people were happy living illiterate" And you of course have all encompassing stats to prove that they were happy. Government education allowed people with limited financial means to give a chance to their kids at least. Problem is not the government education. Problem is that thanks to political games the priorities got completely fucked up. The goal should be to actually educate people not to make sure that everyone passes.
- deepsun 5y ago
  I meant that people often resisted literacy, or at least didn't see any use of it.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

pcmoney 5y ago
Even if that were true, that half would still mop the floor intellectually with the type of fool that would write a statement like the one above.
endominus 5y ago
> Public schools work. You can’t deny that. Per the GP, in their area "the high school math and reading proficiency rate are 8% and 44% respectively, while the graduation rate is >95%". That sounds like an absolute denial that public schools are working, unless your definition of a working school includes ones that don't teach the majority to read and comprehend mathematics at an adult level. Spending on schools is higher than it's ever been, and the results are flat-lining - and have been for decades. See [0]. Perhaps the issue is something that throwing money at them won't fix? Perhaps it behooves us to look deeper and see if the education system is performing what we need it to do. [0]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/brat-us-school-spending-375-percent-over-30-years-/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/mar/02/dave-brat/...
- danaris 5y ago
  Some public schools that we have right now aren't working well (ie, the implementation is a problem, not the idea), because we have, for decades, been siphoning money away from them to fund private schools, refusing to provide funding for necessary materials (textbooks, classroom supplies, building maintenance, desks & chairs that don't break when you sit in them), underpaying and under-hiring teachers so that many people who want to go into teaching feel that they can't because it's unaffordable... Just "throwing money at them" isn't going to work, no, because the money needs to go to the right places. But there are so many places where it's pretty clear that extra money will make a huge difference that arguing that schools are overfunded—or that "public schools don't work"—is just ludicrous.
  - 5y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> My personal opinion is that the government should get out of education, just lower our taxes and let the free market handle the rest. Never gonna happen, however. I don't think that's a good idea. Privatization has a way of making many things worse and more expensive. I can't really see how privatization wouldn't increase the gap between poorer students and students from more well-off families, for instance.