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Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out

Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're only accepting kids with two parents, in fact they're doing a much better job of helping poor families in my district than the public school system, which forces all the poor students into the same schools with literal murderers attending. Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.

colechristensen 3y ago
The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?". But what should we do with the rest?
- parineum 3y ago
  > But what should we do with the rest? The answer to that question is _something_ but I think the real question is "who is 'we'?"
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    Children's public education is an _everybody_ problem. How these bulk problems are handled is something everybody should agree on instead of acting like it's somebody else's problem.
  - black6 3y ago
    The parents. Offloading the responsibility of raising children is a large part of the problem.
    - chowells 3y ago
      Absolutely 100% incorrect. If the parents aren't willing or able to raise their children, someone has to. "Throw them away" is not a moral, ethical, or utilitarian answer.
      - 9530jh9054ven 3y ago
        Why isn't it an answer? At least from a purely utilitarian point of view, cost of educating and raising a child is exorbitant (teachers, food, clothing, shelter, etc) compared to euthanizing them (1 to 5 bullets, executioner pay, and burial costs). Benefits are going to be somewhat iffy; yes they could turn out okay but it's just as likely they could turn into criminal offenders that will chew up resources of the criminal justice system which is quite a lot more expensive. I will emphasize that this is strictly from a utilitarian point of view. I make no comments on the moral, ethical, and legal issues.
        HDThoreaun 3y ago
        I think you missed the "imprison them for 2 decades" part of euthanizing them in your consideration. It's fun to just make up how you think things should ideally work, but we're bounded by how things actually work.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  It's a very important question. I don't have the answer. What I do know is that forcing underprivileged students to attend schools that cause them to fear for their safety or even life is inhumane. Charter schools are solving that in my district.
  - dwater 3y ago
    Based on your previous comment, the remaining 3/4 of students are all murderers, criminals, deviants, disabled, or with parents who aren’t concerned with their education; or some of those 3/4 of students are somewhere in the middle but had their educations diminished by the removal of the better behaved students.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Well no, most of them are in the wealthier areas and don't have to worry about the violence the poor schools experience. There certainly still are deserving students stuck in failing schools and I think that's a tragedy. I don't see why that means we should undo a program that has been helping though.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- chung8123 3y ago
  You don't let them hold the classroom and the rest of the kids that want to learn hostage. Not every problem has a 100% solution.
- tomohawk 3y ago
  Maybe find something more effective than public schools at turning them around. Their track record certainly indicates a different approach is needed. Just because the kids happen to be in government run schools, that doesn't mean that an effective intervention into their lives can be performed there. Schools should be about education, not solving all of society's ills. It is intolerable that one child who disrupts the education environment should be able to prevent so many others from learning. Take the child out of the situation so the others can learn and then figure out what's going on.
- etempleton 3y ago
  In the US it used to be more acceptable to put students in classes based on where they were academically and in terms of behavior. Truly disruptive kids were also usually suspended until eventually being expelled. Neither approach is considered appropriate anymore. It was a central thesis of No Child Left Behind, which is/was nice in theory, but not in practice. Now schools are data obsessed. Bad metrics like suspensions, expulsions, etc are avoided because suspensions are correlated to bad test scores and bad future outcomes for students. So schools now measure performance against that. The problem is obviously correlation vs causation, but if that is how you are graded as a principal that is what you are going to work towards to keep your job. The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids. Slow learners really aren’t much of an issue because they don’t disrupt other kids learning beyond maybe needing more teacher attention.
  - hospadar 3y ago
    > The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids. This kind of attitude is a wide-open door for racist and classist attitudes to penalize kids of color, kids from poor homes, kids with unsafe or unstable home situations. Suspending and expelling kids almost always makes things worse for those kids. There are HUGE racial and gender disparities in the rates of suspension and expulsion[1]. Anecdotally, I know a lot of educators and child social workers who are strongly opposed to suspension & expulsion as a punishment or a "solution". None of them cite "metrics obsession" as their reason, but rather the fact that the kids who are getting kicked out of school need more support, not less. Maybe it seems fine to kick [other people's] kids out of school "for the good of the many", but happens next? What if parents loose their job because they have to stay home for childcare? What if folks end up homeless because they can't pay the bills? What if those kids end up in prisons (that our taxes pay for)? Just from a financial perspective, school is an EXTREMELY cost-effective early intervention compared to prisons, inpatient mental health, welfare systems, etc. Well educated folks often end up making money and paying into tax systems rather than drawing from them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rda.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rda.as...
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  > The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? This is relevant point to the military thing. If you screw up at school, your military parents will be called -- and it may impact them directly. As in, Sgt. X, your kid keeps picking fights, and we're going to punish them, and you, for it. Which means the parents care -- a lot.
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. If you kick out the problematic students, the only students you have left are easy to teach non-problematic students. > and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will be the best. It is a direct application of selection bias. Public schools will be left with whatever students are not accepted into charter schools...those "problematic students", and will...again...due to selection bias have worse results. > It's not like they're only accepting kids with two parents, in fact they're doing a much better job of helping poor families in my district than the public school system That's great for your district, but parent pointed out ending school at noon on Wednesday are going to apply selection bias. Perhaps your district does it better.
- ameminator 3y ago
  I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. Maybe the public school system is failing its students. However, it always seemed unfair to trap parents who would otherwise have other options in a failing system. Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation to their children?
  - femiagbabiaka 3y ago
    Simplistic arguments like this are one of the more annoying parts of the rhetoric of charter school advocates. It assumes that all charter schools are of high quality and that making education yet another thing that is economically stratified in the US is good. It’s ok to say that things that sound nice like choice in education can have knock on effects that are bad for society. Very few things in this world are purely good.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      It seems like a charter school that develops a reputation for low quality is a self-solving problem in a way that a public school which develops the same reputation is (currently) not. One goes out of business; the other goes along indefinitely, with perhaps the wealthiest parents nearby withdrawing their kids, but most families and children are forced to endure it or move away.
pharmakom 3y ago
> Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. This is going to require some backing.
- edflsafoiewq 3y ago
  Coleman report. Student outcomes are primarily effected by parents, then peers, then, as a distant third, schools and teachers.
jimhefferon 3y ago
Serious question: you don't see a dilemma in kicking out those who seem problematic? I absolutely hear you that a parent wants the best for their kid. But historically declaring that some students are an issue has been a frought road.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Of course I see the dilemma. To be honest I just care more about the students who want to succeed than the ones that don't. Every student deserves a high quality education, and that just isn't possible to provide when you're distracted by other students. I care about the other kids too, for ethical as well as utilitarian reason, and I do think we need to think hard about how they can be best served. But the status quo is not working, I don't think it's fair to continue to deprive underprivileged students of the opportunities they deserve.
- SomethingNew2 3y ago
  Let’s assume there will be some % of kids that lack interest in learning, have no parental or community support, and despite schools providing them additional support for years they show no improvement or desire to improve. I think it’s reasonable some % of these people will always be in the population pool. What is the solution for these individuals?
  - lozenge 3y ago
    That's quite a big assumption, but what do you think will happen if you don't offer them any education? They won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, which is far more expensive.
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      Assuming such a group exists, the point is that if you do offer them an education (or, rather, try to force it upon them), they won't accept it, so they still won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, but now their peers don't get an education either and suffer the same fate.
amalcon 3y ago
> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. I'm provisionally accepting this as true, partly because there's some truth in it and partly because I think it leads to an interesting discussion. This is great for the remaining students at the charter school. That problem student goes somewhere, though. That problematic student still exist. They are now in another class, with other students. Some of those students are problematic and some are not, but per your premise -- that other class is now worse than it was. You haven't improved anything, you've just taken a disadvantage from one place and given it to another. One might consider a scenario where this happens repeatedly, and you just get a class full of problematic kids. Those kids don't learn anything, but at least the non-problematic kids do. There are several problems with that scenario, but one such problem is independent of ethical concerns: You just aren't going to find the people to run that school or teach that class for the amount society is willing to pay. Schools for behaviorally problematic students exist. They tend to be private, expensive, and full. They also tend to focus on students who e.g. assault other students in the middle of class, rather than on students who e.g. won't stop talking in class even if repeatedly removed from class, or even students with out-of-school criminal records.
whatahumanright 3y ago
[flagged]
wolverine876 3y ago
Do those charter schools get better results? IIRC, research shows no difference, but maybe that is only in specific locales.
moate 3y ago
“Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.“ If this were unequivocal, people like me wouldn’t fundamentally hate the concept of charter schools. You think “one bad apple spoils the bunch” and that’s an observed effect not a law of nature. You can like charter schools, but don’t pretend that privatization of public resources for means tested approved individuals is an absolute virtue. The world is complicated.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  you're right. Poor choice of words on my part.
diogenes4 3y ago
> It's obviously true for prestigious universities This is a hard argument to make when the use of the gentleman's c is more widespread the more prestigious the school is. Driven students certainly attend prestigious institutions, but overall the prestige of the school a person attended is a very poor signal for the abilities of the person. I transferred from a prestigious private university to a large public university and didn't notice any major difference in the quality of students. The quality of the classes? yes—class size was a major difference. But the students seemed just as sharp in both settings, especially in upper-level classes. Frankly, the major obvious difference was just money. Prestigious, private universities have rich kids in spades. I didn't notice any correlation between the money and the abilities of the person, though. At the end of the day the connections with those kids are where the university you attend really pays off.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
It is both a loophole and the main point. It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society and it's a loophole when they try to sell that concept to the rest of society as "we can teach better for cheaper so give us your tax money and let us replace universal public education" rather than "we have thrown some of your children on the scrapheap for you to expensively support for the rest of their lives and either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value".
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I have no kids. My support of charters has nothing to do with that, especially seeing as I would live in a good public school district anyway. I thought this was clear with the comment but I don't think charter schools teach better or cheaper. They just make it easier for kids to succeed by removing distractions. Before charters almost all of the poor children in the district were being thrown on the scrapheap. Now many of them are getting the education they deserve. I'll admit that I have no perfect solution. I'm not sure there is one. But it seems clear to me that I can't sit by and allow underprivileged students to face the conditions they historically have at public schools here.
- VirusNewbie 3y ago
  >It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society Having a child achieve their full potential actually helps society, it does not hinder it.
- greenhexagon 3y ago
  Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large. Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather than teaching, the result wasn't that the median student pulled the troublemaker up, it was that the troublemaker caused the entire classroom to not learn anything. Society would have been far better off to have the couple students unable to thrive in a conventional classroom go to an alternative school and have all the other students get a decent education.
tiahura 3y ago
Education is mostly about your parents.
xbmcuser 3y ago
The peers part is badly overlooked a lot is talked about how asian countries seem to have a better education system. But overlook the most important part of the education system in asia. The filtering that happens first by school where the top student go to particular schools then even in each grade the students are divided in class by how how good they are.
2devnull 3y ago
“ Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.” But it is sort of what schools currently do. The filter public schools use is housing. You have to buy a home in the school district. That is the reason real estate values are driven by school test scores. Because the opposite is also true: school test scores are a function of who own homes near the school. At the end of the day, maybe that operates better at sorting good apples from bad. I’m probably more in agreement with your line of thinking that making choice easier for poor folks could be best for society, but the selection effect is weaker if you loosen the filter.
r00fus 3y ago
Removing special needs kids from your population is the quickest way to increase test scores and reduce budget. As a parent of a child with special needs, I've studied the financials of schools in my district to find out how special needs services are supported. 1) The federal government has never lived up to its promise of matching 40% of the special needs funding (in my state they cover a mere 8%). 2) Usually the shortfall ends up at the district level. Some districts get more funding from an increased special needs population while others don't (community funding model). 3) Often the district moves programs around so special needs child cohorts (and in some cases teachers) can remain intact while not focusing the lowered scores in one school. 4) Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before. This is probably state-dependent, in California charters have the same obligations (with two different organizational ways of addressing them, either as if they were their own district or as part of the local district) as other public schools with regard to special education.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The charters in my district absolutely support special needs children. I even know a couple special needs teachers at the big charter network. I can't say how their program compares to the public school system's but there it's not empty so I figure it can't be that bad.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Education is mostly about your peers. Nah, its mostly about your socio-economic status, home environment, and similar personal (not peer) factors.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Sure, but the school system has no control over any of that. As far as what it can control, peers are absolutely the most important.

colechristensen 3y ago

The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?". But what should we do with the rest?

parineum 3y ago
> But what should we do with the rest? The answer to that question is _something_ but I think the real question is "who is 'we'?"
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Children's public education is an _everybody_ problem. How these bulk problems are handled is something everybody should agree on instead of acting like it's somebody else's problem.
- black6 3y ago
  The parents. Offloading the responsibility of raising children is a large part of the problem.
  - chowells 3y ago
    Absolutely 100% incorrect. If the parents aren't willing or able to raise their children, someone has to. "Throw them away" is not a moral, ethical, or utilitarian answer.
    - 9530jh9054ven 3y ago
      Why isn't it an answer? At least from a purely utilitarian point of view, cost of educating and raising a child is exorbitant (teachers, food, clothing, shelter, etc) compared to euthanizing them (1 to 5 bullets, executioner pay, and burial costs). Benefits are going to be somewhat iffy; yes they could turn out okay but it's just as likely they could turn into criminal offenders that will chew up resources of the criminal justice system which is quite a lot more expensive. I will emphasize that this is strictly from a utilitarian point of view. I make no comments on the moral, ethical, and legal issues.
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        I think you missed the "imprison them for 2 decades" part of euthanizing them in your consideration. It's fun to just make up how you think things should ideally work, but we're bounded by how things actually work.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
It's a very important question. I don't have the answer. What I do know is that forcing underprivileged students to attend schools that cause them to fear for their safety or even life is inhumane. Charter schools are solving that in my district.
- dwater 3y ago
  Based on your previous comment, the remaining 3/4 of students are all murderers, criminals, deviants, disabled, or with parents who aren’t concerned with their education; or some of those 3/4 of students are somewhere in the middle but had their educations diminished by the removal of the better behaved students.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Well no, most of them are in the wealthier areas and don't have to worry about the violence the poor schools experience. There certainly still are deserving students stuck in failing schools and I think that's a tragedy. I don't see why that means we should undo a program that has been helping though.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
chung8123 3y ago
You don't let them hold the classroom and the rest of the kids that want to learn hostage. Not every problem has a 100% solution.
tomohawk 3y ago
Maybe find something more effective than public schools at turning them around. Their track record certainly indicates a different approach is needed. Just because the kids happen to be in government run schools, that doesn't mean that an effective intervention into their lives can be performed there. Schools should be about education, not solving all of society's ills. It is intolerable that one child who disrupts the education environment should be able to prevent so many others from learning. Take the child out of the situation so the others can learn and then figure out what's going on.
etempleton 3y ago
In the US it used to be more acceptable to put students in classes based on where they were academically and in terms of behavior. Truly disruptive kids were also usually suspended until eventually being expelled. Neither approach is considered appropriate anymore. It was a central thesis of No Child Left Behind, which is/was nice in theory, but not in practice. Now schools are data obsessed. Bad metrics like suspensions, expulsions, etc are avoided because suspensions are correlated to bad test scores and bad future outcomes for students. So schools now measure performance against that. The problem is obviously correlation vs causation, but if that is how you are graded as a principal that is what you are going to work towards to keep your job. The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids. Slow learners really aren’t much of an issue because they don’t disrupt other kids learning beyond maybe needing more teacher attention.
- hospadar 3y ago
  > The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids. This kind of attitude is a wide-open door for racist and classist attitudes to penalize kids of color, kids from poor homes, kids with unsafe or unstable home situations. Suspending and expelling kids almost always makes things worse for those kids. There are HUGE racial and gender disparities in the rates of suspension and expulsion[1]. Anecdotally, I know a lot of educators and child social workers who are strongly opposed to suspension & expulsion as a punishment or a "solution". None of them cite "metrics obsession" as their reason, but rather the fact that the kids who are getting kicked out of school need more support, not less. Maybe it seems fine to kick [other people's] kids out of school "for the good of the many", but happens next? What if parents loose their job because they have to stay home for childcare? What if folks end up homeless because they can't pay the bills? What if those kids end up in prisons (that our taxes pay for)? Just from a financial perspective, school is an EXTREMELY cost-effective early intervention compared to prisons, inpatient mental health, welfare systems, etc. Well educated folks often end up making money and paying into tax systems rather than drawing from them. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rda.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rda.as...
red-iron-pine 3y ago
> The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? This is relevant point to the military thing. If you screw up at school, your military parents will be called -- and it may impact them directly. As in, Sgt. X, your kid keeps picking fights, and we're going to punish them, and you, for it. Which means the parents care -- a lot.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. If you kick out the problematic students, the only students you have left are easy to teach non-problematic students. > and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will be the best. It is a direct application of selection bias. Public schools will be left with whatever students are not accepted into charter schools...those "problematic students", and will...again...due to selection bias have worse results. > It's not like they're only accepting kids with two parents, in fact they're doing a much better job of helping poor families in my district than the public school system That's great for your district, but parent pointed out ending school at noon on Wednesday are going to apply selection bias. Perhaps your district does it better.

ameminator 3y ago
I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. Maybe the public school system is failing its students. However, it always seemed unfair to trap parents who would otherwise have other options in a failing system. Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation to their children?
- femiagbabiaka 3y ago
  Simplistic arguments like this are one of the more annoying parts of the rhetoric of charter school advocates. It assumes that all charter schools are of high quality and that making education yet another thing that is economically stratified in the US is good. It’s ok to say that things that sound nice like choice in education can have knock on effects that are bad for society. Very few things in this world are purely good.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    It seems like a charter school that develops a reputation for low quality is a self-solving problem in a way that a public school which develops the same reputation is (currently) not. One goes out of business; the other goes along indefinitely, with perhaps the wealthiest parents nearby withdrawing their kids, but most families and children are forced to endure it or move away.

pharmakom 3y ago

> Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. This is going to require some backing.

edflsafoiewq 3y ago
Coleman report. Student outcomes are primarily effected by parents, then peers, then, as a distant third, schools and teachers.

jimhefferon 3y ago

Serious question: you don't see a dilemma in kicking out those who seem problematic? I absolutely hear you that a parent wants the best for their kid. But historically declaring that some students are an issue has been a frought road.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Of course I see the dilemma. To be honest I just care more about the students who want to succeed than the ones that don't. Every student deserves a high quality education, and that just isn't possible to provide when you're distracted by other students. I care about the other kids too, for ethical as well as utilitarian reason, and I do think we need to think hard about how they can be best served. But the status quo is not working, I don't think it's fair to continue to deprive underprivileged students of the opportunities they deserve.
SomethingNew2 3y ago
Let’s assume there will be some % of kids that lack interest in learning, have no parental or community support, and despite schools providing them additional support for years they show no improvement or desire to improve. I think it’s reasonable some % of these people will always be in the population pool. What is the solution for these individuals?
- lozenge 3y ago
  That's quite a big assumption, but what do you think will happen if you don't offer them any education? They won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, which is far more expensive.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    Assuming such a group exists, the point is that if you do offer them an education (or, rather, try to force it upon them), they won't accept it, so they still won't earn much or grow the economy and might end up going to prison, but now their peers don't get an education either and suffer the same fate.

amalcon 3y ago

> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. I'm provisionally accepting this as true, partly because there's some truth in it and partly because I think it leads to an interesting discussion. This is great for the remaining students at the charter school. That problem student goes somewhere, though. That problematic student still exist. They are now in another class, with other students. Some of those students are problematic and some are not, but per your premise -- that other class is now worse than it was. You haven't improved anything, you've just taken a disadvantage from one place and given it to another. One might consider a scenario where this happens repeatedly, and you just get a class full of problematic kids. Those kids don't learn anything, but at least the non-problematic kids do. There are several problems with that scenario, but one such problem is independent of ethical concerns: You just aren't going to find the people to run that school or teach that class for the amount society is willing to pay. Schools for behaviorally problematic students exist. They tend to be private, expensive, and full. They also tend to focus on students who e.g. assault other students in the middle of class, rather than on students who e.g. won't stop talking in class even if repeatedly removed from class, or even students with out-of-school criminal records.

whatahumanright 3y ago

[flagged]

wolverine876 3y ago

Do those charter schools get better results? IIRC, research shows no difference, but maybe that is only in specific locales.

moate 3y ago

“Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.“ If this were unequivocal, people like me wouldn’t fundamentally hate the concept of charter schools. You think “one bad apple spoils the bunch” and that’s an observed effect not a law of nature. You can like charter schools, but don’t pretend that privatization of public resources for means tested approved individuals is an absolute virtue. The world is complicated.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
you're right. Poor choice of words on my part.

diogenes4 3y ago

> It's obviously true for prestigious universities This is a hard argument to make when the use of the gentleman's c is more widespread the more prestigious the school is. Driven students certainly attend prestigious institutions, but overall the prestige of the school a person attended is a very poor signal for the abilities of the person. I transferred from a prestigious private university to a large public university and didn't notice any major difference in the quality of students. The quality of the classes? yes—class size was a major difference. But the students seemed just as sharp in both settings, especially in upper-level classes. Frankly, the major obvious difference was just money. Prestigious, private universities have rich kids in spades. I didn't notice any correlation between the money and the abilities of the person, though. At the end of the day the connections with those kids are where the university you attend really pays off.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

It is both a loophole and the main point. It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society and it's a loophole when they try to sell that concept to the rest of society as "we can teach better for cheaper so give us your tax money and let us replace universal public education" rather than "we have thrown some of your children on the scrapheap for you to expensively support for the rest of their lives and either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value".

HDThoreaun 3y ago
I have no kids. My support of charters has nothing to do with that, especially seeing as I would live in a good public school district anyway. I thought this was clear with the comment but I don't think charter schools teach better or cheaper. They just make it easier for kids to succeed by removing distractions. Before charters almost all of the poor children in the district were being thrown on the scrapheap. Now many of them are getting the education they deserve. I'll admit that I have no perfect solution. I'm not sure there is one. But it seems clear to me that I can't sit by and allow underprivileged students to face the conditions they historically have at public schools here.
VirusNewbie 3y ago
>It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society Having a child achieve their full potential actually helps society, it does not hinder it.
greenhexagon 3y ago
Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large. Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather than teaching, the result wasn't that the median student pulled the troublemaker up, it was that the troublemaker caused the entire classroom to not learn anything. Society would have been far better off to have the couple students unable to thrive in a conventional classroom go to an alternative school and have all the other students get a decent education.

tiahura 3y ago

Education is mostly about your parents.

xbmcuser 3y ago

The peers part is badly overlooked a lot is talked about how asian countries seem to have a better education system. But overlook the most important part of the education system in asia. The filtering that happens first by school where the top student go to particular schools then even in each grade the students are divided in class by how how good they are.

2devnull 3y ago

“ Allowing poor students from families that value education to go to schools with like minded students is an unequivocally good thing compared to what the public schools currently do.” But it is sort of what schools currently do. The filter public schools use is housing. You have to buy a home in the school district. That is the reason real estate values are driven by school test scores. Because the opposite is also true: school test scores are a function of who own homes near the school. At the end of the day, maybe that operates better at sorting good apples from bad. I’m probably more in agreement with your line of thinking that making choice easier for poor folks could be best for society, but the selection effect is weaker if you loosen the filter.

r00fus 3y ago

Removing special needs kids from your population is the quickest way to increase test scores and reduce budget. As a parent of a child with special needs, I've studied the financials of schools in my district to find out how special needs services are supported. 1) The federal government has never lived up to its promise of matching 40% of the special needs funding (in my state they cover a mere 8%). 2) Usually the shortfall ends up at the district level. Some districts get more funding from an increased special needs population while others don't (community funding model). 3) Often the district moves programs around so special needs child cohorts (and in some cases teachers) can remain intact while not focusing the lowered scores in one school. 4) Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Charter schools throw a wrench into this as they typically don't support special needs kids, but still get district funding. This causes other schools in the district to look "worse" because their test scores aren't as balanced as before. This is probably state-dependent, in California charters have the same obligations (with two different organizational ways of addressing them, either as if they were their own district or as part of the local district) as other public schools with regard to special education.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
The charters in my district absolutely support special needs children. I even know a couple special needs teachers at the big charter network. I can't say how their program compares to the public school system's but there it's not empty so I figure it can't be that bad.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Education is mostly about your peers. Nah, its mostly about your socio-economic status, home environment, and similar personal (not peer) factors.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Sure, but the school system has no control over any of that. As far as what it can control, peers are absolutely the most important.