3 ms·

The real question is, as always with small school success stories, can it scale? It's well enough to hold students to high standards of attendance, performance

The real question is, as always with small school success stories, can it scale? It's well enough to hold students to high standards of attendance, performance, etc., but what do you do when you can't just send them off to ``normal'' schools? Plus, there's a /reason/ most administrators try to be nice to the parents, you don't want them messing with their kids' lives over things that could be avoided. I do like the fact that they can fire teachers and staff easily, but I have to admit to some trepidation. My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent.

anamax 17y ago
> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent. I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem. What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that, on average, parents move their kinds to better schools? If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions, improving the herd so to speak. When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily. I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a monopoly. Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.
- krakensden 17y ago
  That's nice, except you're ignoring the economics of schooling. It's expensive to pay teachers, to make schools work they need to be nearly at capacity (per-pupil funding, student to teacher ratios, finite amount of space, etc). If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed. In other words, there is never an incentive to to do better because your competitors can't take your customers. This could be solved by having lots and lots of mostly empty schools, but... no one is going to pay for that. It's a lot like the last mile- it's a natural monopoly.
  - anamax 17y ago
    Not at all. In most urban and suburban regions, there are already several schools that are "close enough", and they typically have several classes for each grade. > If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed. Nope. Someone says, "hey demand, here's some supply" and opens a new school. They start small, a couple of classes is "big enough", and the crappy school starts losing students. When they lose enough, the space that they were occupying becomes empty at exactly the same time as a new school needs more space. (No, you don't need all of the standard "big school" facilities to start a school.) Yes, someone goes out of biz. That's a feature. Drive by "Downtown Prep" on San Fernando, almost under the overpass on the Alameda side in San Jose. It looks like a boring office building on the outside.
  - anamax 17y ago
    I note that people actually do open schools, especially when money comes with the students, aka vouchers. Any theory that predicts otherwise is wrong.

anamax 17y ago

> My experience in California's public schools suggests that the teachers most likely to get fired are the better ones, and that the administrators making those decisions are obscenely incompetent. I've no doubt that that's true, but it need not be a problem. What if we let parents move their kids to a different school and found that, on average, parents move their kinds to better schools? If we did, we'd find that schools that made bad decisions, regardless of reason, would tend to lose students to schools that make better decisions, improving the herd so to speak. When kids can't move, bad decisions can survive more easily. I want folks to try to implement better decision procedures. My point is that granting monopolies and freezing things is almost always a mistake because mistakes will be made. There are very good few things that work only in a monopoly. Or, to put it another way, independent error recovery matters.

krakensden 17y ago
That's nice, except you're ignoring the economics of schooling. It's expensive to pay teachers, to make schools work they need to be nearly at capacity (per-pupil funding, student to teacher ratios, finite amount of space, etc). If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed. In other words, there is never an incentive to to do better because your competitors can't take your customers. This could be solved by having lots and lots of mostly empty schools, but... no one is going to pay for that. It's a lot like the last mile- it's a natural monopoly.
- anamax 17y ago
  Not at all. In most urban and suburban regions, there are already several schools that are "close enough", and they typically have several classes for each grade. > If you have two schools, one competently run, one incompetently run, you wind up with a good school that's impossible to get into and a school where you're screwed. Nope. Someone says, "hey demand, here's some supply" and opens a new school. They start small, a couple of classes is "big enough", and the crappy school starts losing students. When they lose enough, the space that they were occupying becomes empty at exactly the same time as a new school needs more space. (No, you don't need all of the standard "big school" facilities to start a school.) Yes, someone goes out of biz. That's a feature. Drive by "Downtown Prep" on San Fernando, almost under the overpass on the Alameda side in San Jose. It looks like a boring office building on the outside.
- anamax 17y ago
  I note that people actually do open schools, especially when money comes with the students, aka vouchers. Any theory that predicts otherwise is wrong.