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How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

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Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#151

Post by EpicEng »

e40 wrote: post #96
roland35 wrote: post #50

I am excited about this approach and I think LeBron's organization has put a lot of though and work with experts on this project. - This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is makin…

Others fall asleep immediately at school since they live with 5+ siblings and there are literally no available beds at home. I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play. Having 5+ children when you have no resources... this is the true elephant in the room. It seems talking about it gets labels thrown around. I guess it's a conversa…

You're getting downvoted, and maybe most of that is a sentiment of "we have to deal with the problem at hand", which is absolutely the only thing an outsider can do, but you're not wrong.

My wife works in a low income school, largest and poorest in the area (a relatively large city.) Pumping more money in does not help. More after school problems does not help much. As far as academic achievement is concerned, these kids are completely stuck because they have what we would consider terrible situations at home.

Sometimes the parents just don't care, sometimes they just don't have the time (multiple jobs). More often than not there is only one parent at home. There's only so much a teacher/school can do if the parent is picking up the ball when the kid gets home.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#152

Post by tonysdg »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #129
byebyetech wrote: post #88

I wish Jeff Bezos can get his head out of his rocket and do something like this with his 100s of billions.

A friend of mine was ranting about how evil Bezos and Musk are. I generally don’t see those two as the worst of the worst, so I spent some time listening to her thoughts. Her basic assertion was that the simple accumulation of that much wealth is itself evil. They could do many things like build schools and since they choose not to they are evil. I mentioned to her that they can’t sell their stock without ceding cont…

Andrew Carnegie, the 20th century industrialist, is perhaps the poster child for wealth accumulation and subsequent philanthropy. I remember reading somewhere that he once said something to the effect of, "A man should spend the first third of his life learning as much as he can; the second third amassing as much money as he can using his acquired knowledge; and the last third giving away both the knowledge and the money."

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#153

Post by JoeAltmaier »

zjacobi wrote: post #147

First: longer days worries me if they aren't starting later. American schools start WAY TOO EARLY and probably make children chronically tired because of this. See https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/back-to-schoo... Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem…

This feeds into the 'if everybody can't succeed, then put up roadblocks to anybody succeeding'.

Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school. Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken. To defy this impulse because it isn't replicable, is to deny the part the govt plays in creating the broken public schools.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#154

Post by EpicEng »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #114
lexs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal responsibility of the parent sure, but the child can't exactly ask to not be born.

Also, is it personal responsibility if the state has put the parent in a situation where they will be systematically stripped of resources?

>Also, is it personal responsibility if the state has put the parent in a situation where they will be systematically stripped of resources?

That is hardly the only problem. Society isn't at fault for all of the ills of low income areas.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#155

Post by lbotos »

triviatise wrote: post #148

The #1 factor for improving schools would be public school choice. Competition makes the participants in any system better. The schools need to use a lottery for acceptance of students. We can drop all the regulation around testing results and simply let people choose which public school they go to. Some schools will be great and have a lot of demand. Some schools will be crap and will have little demand and they sho…

In High School, I went to a magnet school where you had to be in the top 5% of your middle school class to be accepted. We took in students from something like 10 school districts. Freshman year was insane because the quality of student was all over the place. There were segments of students who couldn't read.

There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only going to hurt the students that are already hurting.

I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#156

Post by SamReidHughes »

Nokinside wrote: post #105
BurningFrog wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Warren is a lawyer, not an economist. Her academic career in that field is very impressive, but that has nothing to with an understanding of the science of Economics, which is notoriously full of counterintuitive and misunderstood truths.

You understand economics very narrowly if you use that as the only basis of your ad hominem. Warren worked in the field where she needed good economic knowledge.

I occasionally hear of Warren making statements, about economic matters, that are completely detached from reality. The problem isn't knowledge, it's judgement.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#157

Post by naravara »

brightball wrote: post #57
elsherbini wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for 2 years as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Atlanta Public Schools. I'll preface this by saying I don't know if I believe charter schools are bad or good, but here are some arguments against them: - Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollar…

In the area where I live, there is a lot of anticipation for a Charter school to open because the county school board is so terrible. There are 6 regional seats for a single county wide school district and 3 of the seats vote against ANY improvements or expense increases. In a tie vote, nothing happens. It's been an issue for years at this point. There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county…

>There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.

What's the impediment to voting out those people? Do they represent areas that are mostly retirement communities or something?

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#158

Post by tialaramex »

Retric wrote: post #62
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And are charter schools about reading and math? Cherry picking results is easy to show whatever you like. Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appre…

That's not 'better results' that's different results. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the magnet school model as a good thing. However, you now have to defend the associated sacrifices. I personally feel K-12 is to early to specialize so improvements at the cost of general achievement is a poor use of taxpayer funds.

The "sacrifices" involved in any decision here are actual children too.

For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.

For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.

Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.

All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.

I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#159

Post by naravara »

lbotos wrote: post #155
triviatise wrote: post #148

The #1 factor for improving schools would be public school choice. Competition makes the participants in any system better. The schools need to use a lottery for acceptance of students. We can drop all the regulation around testing results and simply let people choose which public school they go to. Some schools will be great and have a lot of demand. Some schools will be crap and will have little demand and they sho…

In High School, I went to a magnet school where you had to be in the top 5% of your middle school class to be accepted. We took in students from something like 10 school districts. Freshman year was insane because the quality of student was all over the place. There were segments of students who couldn't read. There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only goi…

>I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?

Part of the question is who sets the standard and what do they optimize for?

My experience with most of these NCLB tests is that they're optimized for ease of grading more than actually measuring anything worthwhile about comprehension of development.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#160

Post by patall »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #153
zjacobi wrote: post #147

First: longer days worries me if they aren't starting later. American schools start WAY TOO EARLY and probably make children chronically tired because of this. See https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/parenting/back-to-schoo... Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem…

This feeds into the 'if everybody can't succeed, then put up roadblocks to anybody succeeding'. Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school. Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken. To defy this impulse because it isn't replicable, is to deny the part the govt plays in creating the broken public schools.

Is it? For me that sound more like 'if everybody can't succeed, then make sure you succeed at the cost of decreasing the level for everybody else'.

If I am taking the good teachers from the other schools, I am not fixing anything, I am just transferring social capital from someone else kids to mine.

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