4 ms·

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 lo

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.
- aeturnum 3y ago
  I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education. As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes! However, the question of "how to do a good job educating kids" on a national level must include everyone in the measure. It might be worth having schools for troubled kids! But you have to look across the results of the troubled kids and the more normate ones. I think the root comment's point is that...this seems to have copied the techniques that charter schools use to improve their educational outcomes...but that arguably those schools are not "solving" the same problem as public schools and comparing them does not reveal any insights.
  - jvanderbot 3y ago
    Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc
    - toomanyrichers 3y ago
      Agreed. It’s uselessly idealist to imagine you can serve the 100% without making the 99% much worse off. Actually worse than useless — it’s making things worse for the 99%! Having seen just how much damage a single disruptive student can do, I think there must be alternatives for those that need them — if only to stop disrupting everyone else.
    - davemp 3y ago
      The truly disruptive students will likely receive no meaningful education regardless.
    - aeturnum 3y ago
      > If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.
nine_k 3y ago
Also, think about these disruptive kids. They are the minority. They clearly don't function well in the conventional school setting. They are struggling to learn the material. They learn how to disrupt though, and how the grown-ups around them are powerless. They learn to be constantly blamed, and feel miserable, defiant, or both. A lot of wrong lessons. This makes the lives of these disruptive kids worse. Being in a public school robs them of a chance to become decent people and get an education. These kids should receive a special education, tailored to their special needs, like e.g. autistic kids get a special education.
- trealira 3y ago
  I think you're giving them a little too much credit. Plenty of disruptive kids have a perfectly fine home life, have an iPhone, get expensive toys or technology bought for them. A lot of them are just jerks who were never punished by their parents, received few punishments from teachers and staff who had little power, and enjoy being disruptive or bullying others, and don't give a shit if they flunk all their tests or classes. The teachers say they're going to become a janitor or drop out of high school at this rate, and they don't care because they've been told this all their lives, because their disruptive behaviors haven't gotten better since kindergarten, only gotten more violent and more sexual. And somehow they manage to squeak by to the next grade. I say this speaking from my own experience as someone who went to a Title 1 school before taking a test to get into a magnet program when transitioning to high school (about age 14); the difference in disruptive behavior was like night and day to me. I still remember it very clearly. If education can improve the most by punishing and expelling disruptive students more often, sending them to other schools, I wouldn't be opposed. It would help the non-disruptive majority of students reach their full potential, which is a better outcome than trying to help the disruptive minority at the expense of everyone else.
  - marcus_holmes 3y ago
    You said "punish" so many times. Punishing unruly kids doesn't stop them being unruly. They just learn to hate the system and everything in it. I got expelled from 2 kindergardens, and then was sent to a Montessori school. Where I was fine, even helpful. "the beatings will continue until behaviour improves" just doesn't work, has never worked. Maybe we shouldn't have one school experience for all the kids. Maybe some kids work fine with an authoritarian system and like having a set of rules to follow. Other kids don't.
lmm 3y ago
> either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value Or genuinely think it's of net positive value. One disruptive kid can spoil the educations of 29 others pretty easily, and probably won't even gain anything from staying in school. It's a dead-weight loss. But we're too chickenshit to openly do anything about it, so the rich buy their way away from the bad kids one way or another, and the decent-but-poor get to suffer.
- mips_r4300i 3y ago
  This happened to me, and was one reason why my parents pulled me out of school and I taught myself at home with a standardized curriculum. It was only 1 kid in the class, but he was ruining the entire class almost every day, and the administration didn't want to risk the political fallout. It was great to be able to learn as fast as I wanted with no distractions. Sometimes what has to be learned wasn't interesting and I didn't go any faster at it, but I did pull ahead in math by a couple years by 8th grade.
rayiner 3y ago
Ruining the educational experience for the 90% to drag along the 10% is likely a bigger net negative.

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.

aeturnum 3y ago
I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education. As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes! However, the question of "how to do a good job educating kids" on a national level must include everyone in the measure. It might be worth having schools for troubled kids! But you have to look across the results of the troubled kids and the more normate ones. I think the root comment's point is that...this seems to have copied the techniques that charter schools use to improve their educational outcomes...but that arguably those schools are not "solving" the same problem as public schools and comparing them does not reveal any insights.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc
  - toomanyrichers 3y ago
    Agreed. It’s uselessly idealist to imagine you can serve the 100% without making the 99% much worse off. Actually worse than useless — it’s making things worse for the 99%! Having seen just how much damage a single disruptive student can do, I think there must be alternatives for those that need them — if only to stop disrupting everyone else.
  - davemp 3y ago
    The truly disruptive students will likely receive no meaningful education regardless.
  - aeturnum 3y ago
    > If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.

nine_k 3y ago

Also, think about these disruptive kids. They are the minority. They clearly don't function well in the conventional school setting. They are struggling to learn the material. They learn how to disrupt though, and how the grown-ups around them are powerless. They learn to be constantly blamed, and feel miserable, defiant, or both. A lot of wrong lessons. This makes the lives of these disruptive kids worse. Being in a public school robs them of a chance to become decent people and get an education. These kids should receive a special education, tailored to their special needs, like e.g. autistic kids get a special education.

trealira 3y ago
I think you're giving them a little too much credit. Plenty of disruptive kids have a perfectly fine home life, have an iPhone, get expensive toys or technology bought for them. A lot of them are just jerks who were never punished by their parents, received few punishments from teachers and staff who had little power, and enjoy being disruptive or bullying others, and don't give a shit if they flunk all their tests or classes. The teachers say they're going to become a janitor or drop out of high school at this rate, and they don't care because they've been told this all their lives, because their disruptive behaviors haven't gotten better since kindergarten, only gotten more violent and more sexual. And somehow they manage to squeak by to the next grade. I say this speaking from my own experience as someone who went to a Title 1 school before taking a test to get into a magnet program when transitioning to high school (about age 14); the difference in disruptive behavior was like night and day to me. I still remember it very clearly. If education can improve the most by punishing and expelling disruptive students more often, sending them to other schools, I wouldn't be opposed. It would help the non-disruptive majority of students reach their full potential, which is a better outcome than trying to help the disruptive minority at the expense of everyone else.
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  You said "punish" so many times. Punishing unruly kids doesn't stop them being unruly. They just learn to hate the system and everything in it. I got expelled from 2 kindergardens, and then was sent to a Montessori school. Where I was fine, even helpful. "the beatings will continue until behaviour improves" just doesn't work, has never worked. Maybe we shouldn't have one school experience for all the kids. Maybe some kids work fine with an authoritarian system and like having a set of rules to follow. Other kids don't.

lmm 3y ago

> either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value Or genuinely think it's of net positive value. One disruptive kid can spoil the educations of 29 others pretty easily, and probably won't even gain anything from staying in school. It's a dead-weight loss. But we're too chickenshit to openly do anything about it, so the rich buy their way away from the bad kids one way or another, and the decent-but-poor get to suffer.

mips_r4300i 3y ago
This happened to me, and was one reason why my parents pulled me out of school and I taught myself at home with a standardized curriculum. It was only 1 kid in the class, but he was ruining the entire class almost every day, and the administration didn't want to risk the political fallout. It was great to be able to learn as fast as I wanted with no distractions. Sometimes what has to be learned wasn't interesting and I didn't go any faster at it, but I did pull ahead in math by a couple years by 8th grade.

rayiner 3y ago

Ruining the educational experience for the 90% to drag along the 10% is likely a bigger net negative.