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There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a n

There's room for private schools, but vouchers can't be a thing. I understand public schools can't accommodate every crazy religion, but public education is a necessity for a successful country. Once people get enough first hand experience with schools being horrible, constantly closing, uneducated children, etc. They'll blame whatever their social media tells them to. Inequality can't get much worse before there's a tipping point. People are reallllllly dumb now though so change won't be for better when it comes.

liontwist 2y ago
> public education is a necessity for a successful country. Every time it’s studied it’s really hard to tell whether the system has any learning effect. Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8. When you push on this the answer is it’s actually for socialization and day care while parents work. That starts to sound like compliance training and seems like a weird thing to spend 40% of state budgets on in addition to local and federal funding. > People are reallllllly dumb now Is this the pro-democracy pro-public schooling take?
- whoitwas 2y ago
  You're right. Fuck everything. Let's reinvent the wheel. We don't need books either or roads.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  > Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8. We're not funding education so that the talented ones can be identified and elevated. We're finding it so that the others can be helped to grow. Latent academic ability at age 8 is a pretty small slice of the task.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    The ranking of academic performance at 8 years old remained stable for the next 10 years. Not just the top. If teaching had a positive effect then why would that be stable? That implies that there was no difference caused by course choices, nurturing by a better teacher, etc. so where is the growth? And that’s my anecdote. Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time. I don’t think I believe instruction cannot give you useful information, but that the 3rd-12th grade knowledge is thin, artificial, and non-transferable.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      I see a lot of growth among high schoolers (my wife is a teacher and I volunteer in the math center at the public school where she works, so I have a lot of contact with them). I also experienced it myself. My shift from picking locks (with mischeif in mind) to an enthusiasm for math and science was mediated by four or five great teachers. > Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time. That might be true, but it comes at a cost which is that the first two years of college are just high school again. I've been taking college classes for the last 20 years (most of it far less than full time). It's a bit of a hobby. Every time I switch majors I have to slog through this barrier of classes full of things I already know before I can get on to the good stuff. It's a really stark transition, after which the instructors start treating you like you're there to learn instead of like you're there to score points in some status game. I always end up with really close relationships with the instructors when I'm wading through highschool 2.0 because they're usually pretty happy to have somebody asking questions about the content and not about what's going to be on the test and when I talk to them about this problem they tell me that they've had to realign the curriculum downward because there's a bunch of stuff which they can no longer rely on high school to teach. So yeah, is broken. But it didn't used to be broken. Do you really think the way to fix it is to further lower our expectations about what can be usefully done in k-12? Exempting charter schools from curricular oversight and letting them figure it out (or not) amongst themselves is only going to make for an even wider band of preparedness among college freshmen, which correlates with an even longer slog through highschool 2.0 while the colleges now do even more of the level-setting work that the highschools used to do. That makes the classes more boring, which make college a less attractive option. Plus the taxpayers aren't getting what they're paying for. It's a lose lose scenario.
ndriscoll 2y ago
Assuming vouchers are enough to pay for each student, why is public education specifically necessary as opposed to universally funded education? It seems very non obvious that outcomes would be worse when private schools are currently considered a privilege of the rich.
- whoitwas 2y ago
  Go speak to 10 new teachers at charter schools in poor neighborhoods. Get the fuck out of your own head. The "charter schools" are scamming us for tax dollars. They hire fresh grads, tell them to make a lesson plan for the year, and that's about it. The schools often don't last more than a couple years. People are greedy. We don't need to regulate a solution. KISSSSSSS
  - ndriscoll 2y ago
    My sister went to a charter school until around 5th grade until IIRC she became too stressed out with the work load. I remember my mom telling me that when they switched to normal public school, it was essentially like moving 2-3 years back (which is pretty bad when you're only in elementary school), and she pretty much phoned it in from then on. My experience with public k-12 was that AP chemistry was the only time I remember actually having to put in any effort at all, and I took almost all of the honors/AP classes I could. So maybe some charters are a scam. Others are vastly more rigorous than their neighboring public schools. Some public schools offer essentially no education (are the public schools in those same poor neighborhoods any good?). Again, it's not obvious that giving parents some choice means outcomes must be worse. You could still hold charters to the same low bar public schools are held to for standardized tests. Charters also select for more involved parents by nature of not being the default, so you would a priori expect them to outperform just from that.
    - whoitwas 2y ago
      i suggested you investigate charter schools in poor neighborhoods. they're the scams.

liontwist 2y ago

> public education is a necessity for a successful country. Every time it’s studied it’s really hard to tell whether the system has any learning effect. Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8. When you push on this the answer is it’s actually for socialization and day care while parents work. That starts to sound like compliance training and seems like a weird thing to spend 40% of state budgets on in addition to local and federal funding. > People are reallllllly dumb now Is this the pro-democracy pro-public schooling take?

whoitwas 2y ago
You're right. Fuck everything. Let's reinvent the wheel. We don't need books either or roads.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
> Of all my peers you could pretty much identify their academic ability at age 8. We're not funding education so that the talented ones can be identified and elevated. We're finding it so that the others can be helped to grow. Latent academic ability at age 8 is a pretty small slice of the task.
- liontwist 2y ago
  The ranking of academic performance at 8 years old remained stable for the next 10 years. Not just the top. If teaching had a positive effect then why would that be stable? That implies that there was no difference caused by course choices, nurturing by a better teacher, etc. so where is the growth? And that’s my anecdote. Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time. I don’t think I believe instruction cannot give you useful information, but that the 3rd-12th grade knowledge is thin, artificial, and non-transferable.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    I see a lot of growth among high schoolers (my wife is a teacher and I volunteer in the math center at the public school where she works, so I have a lot of contact with them). I also experienced it myself. My shift from picking locks (with mischeif in mind) to an enthusiasm for math and science was mediated by four or five great teachers. > Some studies indicate you can probably skip a decade and show up to college and catch up to your peers in no time. That might be true, but it comes at a cost which is that the first two years of college are just high school again. I've been taking college classes for the last 20 years (most of it far less than full time). It's a bit of a hobby. Every time I switch majors I have to slog through this barrier of classes full of things I already know before I can get on to the good stuff. It's a really stark transition, after which the instructors start treating you like you're there to learn instead of like you're there to score points in some status game. I always end up with really close relationships with the instructors when I'm wading through highschool 2.0 because they're usually pretty happy to have somebody asking questions about the content and not about what's going to be on the test and when I talk to them about this problem they tell me that they've had to realign the curriculum downward because there's a bunch of stuff which they can no longer rely on high school to teach. So yeah, is broken. But it didn't used to be broken. Do you really think the way to fix it is to further lower our expectations about what can be usefully done in k-12? Exempting charter schools from curricular oversight and letting them figure it out (or not) amongst themselves is only going to make for an even wider band of preparedness among college freshmen, which correlates with an even longer slog through highschool 2.0 while the colleges now do even more of the level-setting work that the highschools used to do. That makes the classes more boring, which make college a less attractive option. Plus the taxpayers aren't getting what they're paying for. It's a lose lose scenario.

ndriscoll 2y ago

Assuming vouchers are enough to pay for each student, why is public education specifically necessary as opposed to universally funded education? It seems very non obvious that outcomes would be worse when private schools are currently considered a privilege of the rich.

whoitwas 2y ago
Go speak to 10 new teachers at charter schools in poor neighborhoods. Get the fuck out of your own head. The "charter schools" are scamming us for tax dollars. They hire fresh grads, tell them to make a lesson plan for the year, and that's about it. The schools often don't last more than a couple years. People are greedy. We don't need to regulate a solution. KISSSSSSS
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  My sister went to a charter school until around 5th grade until IIRC she became too stressed out with the work load. I remember my mom telling me that when they switched to normal public school, it was essentially like moving 2-3 years back (which is pretty bad when you're only in elementary school), and she pretty much phoned it in from then on. My experience with public k-12 was that AP chemistry was the only time I remember actually having to put in any effort at all, and I took almost all of the honors/AP classes I could. So maybe some charters are a scam. Others are vastly more rigorous than their neighboring public schools. Some public schools offer essentially no education (are the public schools in those same poor neighborhoods any good?). Again, it's not obvious that giving parents some choice means outcomes must be worse. You could still hold charters to the same low bar public schools are held to for standardized tests. Charters also select for more involved parents by nature of not being the default, so you would a priori expect them to outperform just from that.
  - whoitwas 2y ago
    i suggested you investigate charter schools in poor neighborhoods. they're the scams.