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I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classroom

I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.

PaulHoule 2y ago
It's a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model where "voice" never works.
- disqard 2y ago
  TIL, thank you for sharing that. Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not. Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)
msluyter 2y ago
| Private schools are outrageously expensive. Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone. And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
- cloverich 2y ago
  I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
  - vel0city 2y ago
    More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
    - cloverich 2y ago
      Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
      - vel0city 2y ago
        Yes, I definitely agree, YMMV, tax situations and school district quality vary greatly depending on specifics.
- Yoric 2y ago
  Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values Here's some tangential anecdata. I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall. Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars. Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh. The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
  - adamsb6 2y ago
    Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary. Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
  - mikeyouse 2y ago
    What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one. You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
    - 2y ago
- thayne 2y ago
  IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away. And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
  - 9991 2y ago
    > And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district. That's the whole point. Keeps out the riff-raff.
    - cootsnuck 2y ago
      No need to hide behind euphemism. Just say what you mean.
brightball 2y ago
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms. A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it. Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are... 1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want. 2. Pay for private school. 3. Home school. 4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too. The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education. This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas. Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too. You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now. My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
demosthanos 2y ago
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct. I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains. There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
    - ruthmarx 2y ago
      Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
  - d4mi3n 2y ago
    As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot. It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty. 0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051755 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn... 1. https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/ https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/
cratermoon 2y ago
Ah, so you just opt out of being around average people. OK.
rayiner 2y ago
Private schools isn’t much better. Kids don’t learn much more, everything is just less chaotic because they can counsel out the ones who can’t behave.
gonzobonzo 2y ago
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level. Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
- poulsbohemian 2y ago
  >Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    If you really believe this, then sue your school district. AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.
  - gonzobonzo 2y ago
    > Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration. It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet." There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
Aurornis 2y ago
> Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
- cjohnson318 2y ago
  Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
- Rebelgecko 2y ago
  A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
- nosefurhairdo 2y ago
  Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
  - eduction 2y ago
    It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
    - ty6853 2y ago
      The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
windexh8er 2y ago
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation. Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years. As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about. We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools. As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science. Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  "Expulsion works." There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
  - anon291 2y ago
    Why would a school expel students? They get money for each person sitting in the desk.
  - 2y ago
UltraSane 2y ago
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so. The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things. The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
- thelock85 2y ago
  A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
- randerson 2y ago
  I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.
  - UltraSane 2y ago
    That still falls under option 1.
    - Glyptodon 2y ago
      I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
- aliasxneo 2y ago
  The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.
deleted 2y ago
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poulsbohemian 2y ago
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
- wat10000 2y ago
  My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
- encoderer 2y ago
  This is exactly the point of the article. I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl. If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling. Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
- propernoun 2y ago
  I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours. If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
So homeschooling is not just an ideological choice anymore
deleted 2y ago
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rbanffy 2y ago
> Private schools are outrageously expensive. I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians. A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea. Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early. Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.
rstuart4133 2y ago
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest. If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.

PaulHoule 2y ago

It's a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model where "voice" never works.

disqard 2y ago
TIL, thank you for sharing that. Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not. Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)

msluyter 2y ago

| Private schools are outrageously expensive. Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone. And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)

cloverich 2y ago
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
- vel0city 2y ago
  More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
  - cloverich 2y ago
    Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Yes, I definitely agree, YMMV, tax situations and school district quality vary greatly depending on specifics.
Yoric 2y ago
Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values Here's some tangential anecdata. I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall. Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars. Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh. The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
- adamsb6 2y ago
  Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary. Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
- mikeyouse 2y ago
  What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one. You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
  - 2y ago
thayne 2y ago
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away. And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
- 9991 2y ago
  > And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district. That's the whole point. Keeps out the riff-raff.
  - cootsnuck 2y ago
    No need to hide behind euphemism. Just say what you mean.

brightball 2y ago

This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms. A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it. Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are... 1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want. 2. Pay for private school. 3. Home school. 4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too. The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education. This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas. Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too. You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now. My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.

vel0city 2y ago
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service. We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.

demosthanos 2y ago

There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct. I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains. There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.

ruthmarx 2y ago
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
- from-nibly 2y ago
  Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
- d4mi3n 2y ago
  As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot. It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty. 0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0051755 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn... 1. https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/ https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/

cratermoon 2y ago

Ah, so you just opt out of being around average people. OK.

rayiner 2y ago

Private schools isn’t much better. Kids don’t learn much more, everything is just less chaotic because they can counsel out the ones who can’t behave.

gonzobonzo 2y ago

I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level. Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.

poulsbohemian 2y ago
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  If you really believe this, then sue your school district. AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  > Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration. It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet." There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.

Aurornis 2y ago

> Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.

cjohnson318 2y ago
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
nosefurhairdo 2y ago
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
- eduction 2y ago
  It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.

windexh8er 2y ago

I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation. Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years. As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about. We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools. As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science. Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.

UltraSane 2y ago
"Expulsion works." There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
- anon291 2y ago
  Why would a school expel students? They get money for each person sitting in the desk.
- 2y ago

UltraSane 2y ago

Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so. The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things. The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.

thelock85 2y ago
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
randerson 2y ago
I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  That still falls under option 1.
  - Glyptodon 2y ago
    I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
aliasxneo 2y ago
The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.

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poulsbohemian 2y ago

>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.

wat10000 2y ago
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
encoderer 2y ago
This is exactly the point of the article. I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl. If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling. Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
propernoun 2y ago
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours. If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.

ErigmolCt 2y ago

So homeschooling is not just an ideological choice anymore

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rbanffy 2y ago

> Private schools are outrageously expensive. I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians. A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea. Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early. Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.

rstuart4133 2y ago

A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest. If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.