8 ms·

Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from

Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools. I'm a comparatively wealthy parent, I've bothered to look at the data, and I'm sending my kids to public schools. I really don't believe it's about giving their kids a better education, because the studies pretty consistently show that public schools have superior outcomes when you adjust for socioeconomic status of individual students and special needs. The private schools of course don't accept these students. It's about exclusivity.

chung8123 3y ago
If we do dollar for dollar, spending more money on schools isn't going to help the outcomes either. The money would be better spent on the home life since that is what determines kids outcome the most.
barry-cotter 3y ago
> Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools. No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs. [1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  A great deal of the positive effect of a public school is that you end up with a less homogeneous group of peers, imho. At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.
  - mhuffman 3y ago
    While your thought experiment is noble, many parents are worried about violence, their children actually learning usable skills and not just social/political ideologies (not taking a side, but that is a thing now), and being prepared to take care of themselves and family and contribute to their community as an adult. In my experience, many public school systems pay lip service to those things but practically are uninterested in that treating the system as just a jobs program (especially for large school systems) or as a political tool a lot of which comes from the Federal government and changes every few years. It is a sad state but true and you can't reasonably blame parents for wanting something different for their children when all attempts and working through the public school system come to nothing. You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer! My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.

chung8123 3y ago

If we do dollar for dollar, spending more money on schools isn't going to help the outcomes either. The money would be better spent on the home life since that is what determines kids outcome the most.

barry-cotter 3y ago

> Except that if they put the same money into their public school that they do into the private schools, they'd get even more superior outcomes than they do from funding private schools. No, they wouldn’t. Schools have extremely small effects on student learning, if that[1]. Private schools buy a safer, more class homogeneous environment which is worth a lot but you can get the same effect by living in the right suburbs. [1] Education and Intelligence: Pity the Poor Teacher because Student Characteristics are more Significant than Teachers or Schools Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-psychology/article/abs/education-and-intelligence-pity-the-poor-teacher-because-student-characteristics-are-more-significant-than-teachers-or-schools/F73D9839D7E1398C33A117CB37E084E8 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/spanish-journal-of-p...

IggleSniggle 3y ago
A great deal of the positive effect of a public school is that you end up with a less homogeneous group of peers, imho. At any rate, I've seen that data and think it's perfectly applicable to what I was saying. My argument wasn't really about the spend on "the school" per se, but more that the resources could be better spent on the behalf of students if it wasn't directed to a private school, whether that's spend on the community environment or specifically on the students themselves (like with tutoring, or sponsoring a club). Directing money towards a private school is counterproductive to both the individual and the wellbeing of your own community. This does assume day-schools. Boarding schools are an entirely separate beast, and I don't have a strong sense of why parents choose them, despite having taught at one for a few years. Mastery learning can be applied in any setting. The thing that remains is, do you teach your student how the world is, or how act in order to be enculturated into an elite "in" group? I would argue that the former can confer the benefits of the later, but that the reverse is much harder.
- mhuffman 3y ago
  While your thought experiment is noble, many parents are worried about violence, their children actually learning usable skills and not just social/political ideologies (not taking a side, but that is a thing now), and being prepared to take care of themselves and family and contribute to their community as an adult. In my experience, many public school systems pay lip service to those things but practically are uninterested in that treating the system as just a jobs program (especially for large school systems) or as a political tool a lot of which comes from the Federal government and changes every few years. It is a sad state but true and you can't reasonably blame parents for wanting something different for their children when all attempts and working through the public school system come to nothing. You also mention community over and over as if every community in the US is similar in demographics or culture which is also not the case. All Muslim people I know, for example, send their children to private school, some driving nearly 50 miles both ways twice a day (200 miles!) just to do it after getting a taste of what the local public school system had to offer! My own children all went to public school and if I had a chance to do it over again I would have put them in private school.