5 ms·

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same sc

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

yzzxy 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
willvarfar 12y ago
All the uninterested parents would become really interested around selection time trying to get their kids into the 'best' schools. As soon as the choice is made, however, they'd be back to indifference. School is viewed as delegating responsibility from parent to teacher. In England there have been so-silly-its-staggering stories of anti-terror legislation being used to spy on parents suspected of lying about their addresses in order to get their kids into particular school catchment areas. You'd imagine that these are parents who super-care. I'm skeptical; I think they are parents who have an intense interest only at the beginning and no lingering part in educating their children.
- wtallis 12y ago
  And the worst thing is that to a limited extent, the caring-only-at-registration strategy does help that family some, because their kids will at least be in a functional learning environment for part of the day. It only falls apart when the families that care get diluted enough that the teachers have to spend too much time dragging along the unengaged students.
- cafard 12y ago
  Some New Jersey school districts put effort into tracking down kids from out of the district, and some New Jersey parents put effort into getting their kid into a district where they don't reside. And I have known people in the District of Columbia to put work into out-of-bounds registration for particular schools.
thinkling 12y ago
Because that penalizes the kids whose parents are less engaged, for whatever reason. And the less engaged parents are more likely to be the poorer parents, so you're reducing the kids' chances to escape poverty. It is effectively what happens in urban areas where richer parents send their kids to private schools and disengage from the public school system.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Yet in the poorest areas of the world kids beg for pens/pencils and paper because they can then use that to go to school. Poverty can't really be the entire reason despite the close correlation.
  - rdtsc 12y ago
    I the key is not poverty per se, but cultural and family attitudes toward learning. In US poverty is usually a proxy for bad attitudes toward learning. In other countries it might not be. Poverty is also often a proxy for noxious family environment. Which doesn't have to be true. Someone from a rich family could be abused and tormented by his caretakers just as much.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Now you're talking about school choice and maybe admission exams, both of which are anathema in US educational politics. As a Euro living in the US I can see why the busing policy implemented following Brown v. Board of Education seemed like such an urgent necessity, but it seems to have ended up as an unworkable mess, with those who can afford it (most of whom are white) sending their kids off to private schools and leaving the public school system circling the drain.
- sitkack 12y ago
  Bussing is stupid, having rich neighborhoods get better schools is more stupid. All schools should get the same. We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. The fact that property taxes funded schools IS THE CRIMINAL construction. It sounds democratic, but so does pulling ones self up by their bootstraps. It only cements the class order.
  - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
    > We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. Equal funding doesn't actually fix anything, especially if equal means equally low. And money doesn't help if it gets spent on worthless bureaucracy. Moreover, the home life of the students matters a lot. The difference between going home to a decent meal and supportive parents vs. absentee or abusive parents is not something you can lay on the schools. These things coalesce into the fact that DC has one of the highest per-student budgets in the country but gets some of the worst results. Because they have an enormous amount of bureaucracy and a very poor student population. Making the funding unconditional would solve half the problem by eliminating a lot of the bureaucracy and giving the local communities an incentive to show up, but the other half of the problem would still be there.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    > having rich neighborhoods get better schools is more stupid. All schools should get the same. We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. Schools in poor neighbourhoods needs more money if we want the kids to get an education of similar quality. The reason being that running a school with students from poor households to a standard that gives the same education as students from rich households costs a lot more money. Some examples (based on my experience in the UK) of the extra costs schools have or may have with lower income families (some of which are covered with extra grants from the local council in the case of the UK, some of which they have to cover from discretionary funds): * School breakfast or dinners. This is perhaps one of the most vital ones. If you charge for meals in the school, either you need to provide vouchers or some other means to make it accessible to poorer families, or their kids fall behind as a result of some of them not eating through the day. If you don't serve meals in school, including breakfast, you can assume that kids from poor families will perform substantially worse on average. My sons school to their credit chose to prioritize free meals to all students to avoid having to deal with visibly separate treatment of the kids. * School trips. My sons school asks for a specific "donation" instead of demanding payment whenever possible, again to avoid having to means test and deal with excluding kids from trips because of parents who can't or won't prioritise the cost of the trips. They'll make it very clear that too few paying will lead to cancelled trips, but so far that has never happened, but they do have to regularly dip into discretionary funds to cover shortfalls. * Families with disabled or special needs kids or disabled carers are more likely to either be low income (as a result of parents with disabilities that reduce their earnings potential) or have stretched finances (as a result of additional costs of care), and so more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods. Same for families where the parents have all kinds of problems that affect the kids, such as alcohol or dug addiction etc.. This tends to result in substantially higher costs for all kinds of assistance programs for schools in poorer areas. Even if you cover all of the extra costs, the kids in these families are still at a severe disadvantage on average due to all kinds of other factors (less likely to have role models with high education or that pushes them towards higher education, for example). Giving kids actual equal education (instead of just trying to equalise access to same quality education) would require massive extra funding to poor neighbourhoods.
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start. A big part of the problem is that federal law ties the community's hands. Even if you got all the like-minded people together, you can't get out of the fact that a very large quantity of federal dollars are contingent on you doing a very large quantity of bureaucratic nonsense. Which is why the communities are so disinterested -- if they have no power to change anything then why bother showing up?
coupdejarnac 12y ago
They have those- private schools. Unfortunately they're not financially accessible to everyone. The public school district I was in did not have magnet schools, so my parents had to look for an external solution. I attended a Catholic college prep school (I'm not Catholic), and it was great to be in a place that prioritized education over football BS.
a-saleh 12y ago
We had this on a school level. I am from different country and educational system, but have seen the pattern for several years as I was attending. After first 4 years of school, all the classmates were split according to some equivalent of GPA. Because we had 4 classes in a year (class as a group of students sharing a room and a schedule), it resulted in one full of very good students, two more or less mixed and one class of students that were barely passing from year to year. I don't think it helped.
- xaa 12y ago
  In many US schools, there is a similar system: gifted programs (in elementary), pre-AP (middle school), and AP (high school) segregate the "gifted" kids from the rest. I think it actually helps the gifted students. A lot. The best teachers want to teach in the "gifted" track, because there is a lot more participation and interest, and they can move faster because they don't have to teach to the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, while every student can learn, they cannot all learn at the same rate. This is why "no child left behind"-like strategies fail: not all students are equal, and a focus on those who are behind inevitably penalizes those who are ahead. While good teachers can indeed bring students who are behind further back to parity, it is unfair to lump the burden of environmental and biological differences between students onto teachers, who have to bring them all to a pre-determined standard. Ultimately, school policy has to acknowledge that it is of the highest priority to thoroughly educate the gifted students, who will become society's future leaders and knowledge workers. As a liberal who is concerned about income inequality, it pains me to admit these things, but that's the way it is.
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  You get a better ROI on the good students. They ended up with a better education at the end not being dragged down by apathetic/disruptive/clueless classmates while the less gifted students weren't made to speed through material beyond their level. Why don't you think it helped?
bmj 12y ago
It's been a long time since I was in school, but if memory serves correctly, there were plenty of dis-engaged parents in the 1980s, too, but the schools didn't seem to suffer the same ills they do today. My wife and I homeschool our kids, but we have very good friends who send their kids to what's considered to be a very good public elementary school. They, as well as other parents, are engaged, even helping out in the classrooms. They speak highly of some teachers, but even with all this involvement, hands are tied by the expectations of the board of education. The kids spend large swaths of their day simply doing worksheets that prepare them for standardized tests. In my experience, parents that really do care often end up taking their kids out of the public school system because, as the teacher in the original article notes, the edicts coming from "on high" really tie the hands of people who are trying hard to care about the kids.
Donzo 12y ago
We do this in Chicago. We call them "magnet" schools, as they are intended to attract the best and the brightest. On the one hand, these are the most diverse schools in this heavily segregated city. They give students from rough neighborhoods a better chance to live a different life. On the other hand, they decrease the quality of neighborhood schools (non-magnet) by skimming the cream from the top, if you will. Now, the real problem with this system is how it deals with the intelligent but apathetic student. This student will not meet the criteria to enter one of these magnet schools, regardless of his or her test performance, and will be left in a virtual dumping ground, surrounded by few academically inclined individuals to motivate or otherwise inspire him or her. His or her teachers are likely to be burned out by the disparity of their environment. He or she may not have the right combination of toughness and grace to survive four years in this environment and is likely to become one of the roughly 50% of CPS students who drop out. Now, does this seem like an appropriate path for a bright student who was unmotivated to complete their homework in the sixth or seventh grade, perhaps due to crippling emotional stress (jailed, drug addicted, or murdered parent)? I don't have a better system, but I think that we can do better.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  Maybe this is far too naive, but wouldn't a smart but unmotivated kid respond to the same incentives as anyone else? Namely, can we figure out how to reward kids and their families monetarily for staying in school and excelling? The promise of some scholarship years down the line might not do it. Obviously this is tricky business for a host of reasons, but if we expect education to be a worthwhile investment, there's got to be some way to 'borrow' against those expected future gains.
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  I went to a "magnet" elementary school. Pretty sure there was no criteria, it was just the public elementary school of the area. There was a mix of students from the suburban areas and the more ghetto area about 30 minutes away. One kid in 2nd grade or so was found selling crack in the bathroom. It seemed to have a lot of expensive stuff and had some computer class where we just did things in certain games like making a roller coaster. Macintosh computers oddly.
analog31 12y ago
This sort of happens already, at least for families that are economically empowered. My spouse and I paid a premium for a house in a neighborhood that has good schools. Most of the parents in the school area have college or higher degrees. In some other states, parents just put their kids in private schools. This kind of economic segregation, in addition to kids receiving considerable support at home, can make it seem to those who only experience middle-and-above-class society, like education is OK. We do the same economically as we always have, because the underclass have always been the underclass. While this hardly seems moral, it has become more alarming since it seems like the underclass is gradually expanding. It doesn't help families who care, but who can't afford an expensive house. Also, someone could really care a lot, but they are still at a disadvantage if: 1. They are a single parent working two or three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and just can't pay as much attention to their kids 2. They don't have the experience or the network of friends to help them deal with situations when things aren't going well enough at school, and their kids end up falling through the cracks In my view, dismissing / blaming families for the condition of schools becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
mason240 12y ago
They already exist, most people call them "suburbs."

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

yzzxy 12y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_school

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

willvarfar 12y ago

All the uninterested parents would become really interested around selection time trying to get their kids into the 'best' schools. As soon as the choice is made, however, they'd be back to indifference. School is viewed as delegating responsibility from parent to teacher. In England there have been so-silly-its-staggering stories of anti-terror legislation being used to spy on parents suspected of lying about their addresses in order to get their kids into particular school catchment areas. You'd imagine that these are parents who super-care. I'm skeptical; I think they are parents who have an intense interest only at the beginning and no lingering part in educating their children.

wtallis 12y ago
And the worst thing is that to a limited extent, the caring-only-at-registration strategy does help that family some, because their kids will at least be in a functional learning environment for part of the day. It only falls apart when the families that care get diluted enough that the teachers have to spend too much time dragging along the unengaged students.
cafard 12y ago
Some New Jersey school districts put effort into tracking down kids from out of the district, and some New Jersey parents put effort into getting their kid into a district where they don't reside. And I have known people in the District of Columbia to put work into out-of-bounds registration for particular schools.

thinkling 12y ago

Because that penalizes the kids whose parents are less engaged, for whatever reason. And the less engaged parents are more likely to be the poorer parents, so you're reducing the kids' chances to escape poverty. It is effectively what happens in urban areas where richer parents send their kids to private schools and disengage from the public school system.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
Yet in the poorest areas of the world kids beg for pens/pencils and paper because they can then use that to go to school. Poverty can't really be the entire reason despite the close correlation.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  I the key is not poverty per se, but cultural and family attitudes toward learning. In US poverty is usually a proxy for bad attitudes toward learning. In other countries it might not be. Poverty is also often a proxy for noxious family environment. Which doesn't have to be true. Someone from a rich family could be abused and tormented by his caretakers just as much.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Now you're talking about school choice and maybe admission exams, both of which are anathema in US educational politics. As a Euro living in the US I can see why the busing policy implemented following Brown v. Board of Education seemed like such an urgent necessity, but it seems to have ended up as an unworkable mess, with those who can afford it (most of whom are white) sending their kids off to private schools and leaving the public school system circling the drain.

sitkack 12y ago
Bussing is stupid, having rich neighborhoods get better schools is more stupid. All schools should get the same. We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. The fact that property taxes funded schools IS THE CRIMINAL construction. It sounds democratic, but so does pulling ones self up by their bootstraps. It only cements the class order.
- AnthonyMouse 12y ago
  > We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. Equal funding doesn't actually fix anything, especially if equal means equally low. And money doesn't help if it gets spent on worthless bureaucracy. Moreover, the home life of the students matters a lot. The difference between going home to a decent meal and supportive parents vs. absentee or abusive parents is not something you can lay on the schools. These things coalesce into the fact that DC has one of the highest per-student budgets in the country but gets some of the worst results. Because they have an enormous amount of bureaucracy and a very poor student population. Making the funding unconditional would solve half the problem by eliminating a lot of the bureaucracy and giving the local communities an incentive to show up, but the other half of the problem would still be there.
- vidarh 12y ago
  > having rich neighborhoods get better schools is more stupid. All schools should get the same. We fund all schools equally, across the board, no questions. Schools in poor neighbourhoods needs more money if we want the kids to get an education of similar quality. The reason being that running a school with students from poor households to a standard that gives the same education as students from rich households costs a lot more money. Some examples (based on my experience in the UK) of the extra costs schools have or may have with lower income families (some of which are covered with extra grants from the local council in the case of the UK, some of which they have to cover from discretionary funds): * School breakfast or dinners. This is perhaps one of the most vital ones. If you charge for meals in the school, either you need to provide vouchers or some other means to make it accessible to poorer families, or their kids fall behind as a result of some of them not eating through the day. If you don't serve meals in school, including breakfast, you can assume that kids from poor families will perform substantially worse on average. My sons school to their credit chose to prioritize free meals to all students to avoid having to deal with visibly separate treatment of the kids. * School trips. My sons school asks for a specific "donation" instead of demanding payment whenever possible, again to avoid having to means test and deal with excluding kids from trips because of parents who can't or won't prioritise the cost of the trips. They'll make it very clear that too few paying will lead to cancelled trips, but so far that has never happened, but they do have to regularly dip into discretionary funds to cover shortfalls. * Families with disabled or special needs kids or disabled carers are more likely to either be low income (as a result of parents with disabilities that reduce their earnings potential) or have stretched finances (as a result of additional costs of care), and so more likely to live in poorer neighbourhoods. Same for families where the parents have all kinds of problems that affect the kids, such as alcohol or dug addiction etc.. This tends to result in substantially higher costs for all kinds of assistance programs for schools in poorer areas. Even if you cover all of the extra costs, the kids in these families are still at a severe disadvantage on average due to all kinds of other factors (less likely to have role models with high education or that pushes them towards higher education, for example). Giving kids actual equal education (instead of just trying to equalise access to same quality education) would require massive extra funding to poor neighbourhoods.

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start. A big part of the problem is that federal law ties the community's hands. Even if you got all the like-minded people together, you can't get out of the fact that a very large quantity of federal dollars are contingent on you doing a very large quantity of bureaucratic nonsense. Which is why the communities are so disinterested -- if they have no power to change anything then why bother showing up?

coupdejarnac 12y ago

They have those- private schools. Unfortunately they're not financially accessible to everyone. The public school district I was in did not have magnet schools, so my parents had to look for an external solution. I attended a Catholic college prep school (I'm not Catholic), and it was great to be in a place that prioritized education over football BS.

a-saleh 12y ago

We had this on a school level. I am from different country and educational system, but have seen the pattern for several years as I was attending. After first 4 years of school, all the classmates were split according to some equivalent of GPA. Because we had 4 classes in a year (class as a group of students sharing a room and a schedule), it resulted in one full of very good students, two more or less mixed and one class of students that were barely passing from year to year. I don't think it helped.

xaa 12y ago
In many US schools, there is a similar system: gifted programs (in elementary), pre-AP (middle school), and AP (high school) segregate the "gifted" kids from the rest. I think it actually helps the gifted students. A lot. The best teachers want to teach in the "gifted" track, because there is a lot more participation and interest, and they can move faster because they don't have to teach to the lowest common denominator. Unfortunately, while every student can learn, they cannot all learn at the same rate. This is why "no child left behind"-like strategies fail: not all students are equal, and a focus on those who are behind inevitably penalizes those who are ahead. While good teachers can indeed bring students who are behind further back to parity, it is unfair to lump the burden of environmental and biological differences between students onto teachers, who have to bring them all to a pre-determined standard. Ultimately, school policy has to acknowledge that it is of the highest priority to thoroughly educate the gifted students, who will become society's future leaders and knowledge workers. As a liberal who is concerned about income inequality, it pains me to admit these things, but that's the way it is.
jimmaswell 12y ago
You get a better ROI on the good students. They ended up with a better education at the end not being dragged down by apathetic/disruptive/clueless classmates while the less gifted students weren't made to speed through material beyond their level. Why don't you think it helped?

bmj 12y ago

It's been a long time since I was in school, but if memory serves correctly, there were plenty of dis-engaged parents in the 1980s, too, but the schools didn't seem to suffer the same ills they do today. My wife and I homeschool our kids, but we have very good friends who send their kids to what's considered to be a very good public elementary school. They, as well as other parents, are engaged, even helping out in the classrooms. They speak highly of some teachers, but even with all this involvement, hands are tied by the expectations of the board of education. The kids spend large swaths of their day simply doing worksheets that prepare them for standardized tests. In my experience, parents that really do care often end up taking their kids out of the public school system because, as the teacher in the original article notes, the edicts coming from "on high" really tie the hands of people who are trying hard to care about the kids.

Donzo 12y ago

We do this in Chicago. We call them "magnet" schools, as they are intended to attract the best and the brightest. On the one hand, these are the most diverse schools in this heavily segregated city. They give students from rough neighborhoods a better chance to live a different life. On the other hand, they decrease the quality of neighborhood schools (non-magnet) by skimming the cream from the top, if you will. Now, the real problem with this system is how it deals with the intelligent but apathetic student. This student will not meet the criteria to enter one of these magnet schools, regardless of his or her test performance, and will be left in a virtual dumping ground, surrounded by few academically inclined individuals to motivate or otherwise inspire him or her. His or her teachers are likely to be burned out by the disparity of their environment. He or she may not have the right combination of toughness and grace to survive four years in this environment and is likely to become one of the roughly 50% of CPS students who drop out. Now, does this seem like an appropriate path for a bright student who was unmotivated to complete their homework in the sixth or seventh grade, perhaps due to crippling emotional stress (jailed, drug addicted, or murdered parent)? I don't have a better system, but I think that we can do better.

twoodfin 12y ago
Maybe this is far too naive, but wouldn't a smart but unmotivated kid respond to the same incentives as anyone else? Namely, can we figure out how to reward kids and their families monetarily for staying in school and excelling? The promise of some scholarship years down the line might not do it. Obviously this is tricky business for a host of reasons, but if we expect education to be a worthwhile investment, there's got to be some way to 'borrow' against those expected future gains.
jimmaswell 12y ago
I went to a "magnet" elementary school. Pretty sure there was no criteria, it was just the public elementary school of the area. There was a mix of students from the suburban areas and the more ghetto area about 30 minutes away. One kid in 2nd grade or so was found selling crack in the bathroom. It seemed to have a lot of expensive stuff and had some computer class where we just did things in certain games like making a roller coaster. Macintosh computers oddly.

analog31 12y ago

This sort of happens already, at least for families that are economically empowered. My spouse and I paid a premium for a house in a neighborhood that has good schools. Most of the parents in the school area have college or higher degrees. In some other states, parents just put their kids in private schools. This kind of economic segregation, in addition to kids receiving considerable support at home, can make it seem to those who only experience middle-and-above-class society, like education is OK. We do the same economically as we always have, because the underclass have always been the underclass. While this hardly seems moral, it has become more alarming since it seems like the underclass is gradually expanding. It doesn't help families who care, but who can't afford an expensive house. Also, someone could really care a lot, but they are still at a disadvantage if: 1. They are a single parent working two or three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, and just can't pay as much attention to their kids 2. They don't have the experience or the network of friends to help them deal with situations when things aren't going well enough at school, and their kids end up falling through the cracks In my view, dismissing / blaming families for the condition of schools becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

mason240 12y ago

They already exist, most people call them "suburbs."