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LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

nytimes.com

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Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#131

Post by wallace_f »

thatoneuser wrote: post #85
_qbjt wrote: post #71

This story resonates with me deeply. I grew up in a lower income, single parent household to a family environment plagued with drug addiction and feelings of economic hopelessness. I was on track to drop out by my senior year of high school. My father (who was always in and out of prison) committed suicide my freshman year of high school. I was distraught but blessed. My English teacher at the time noticed what I was…

I grew up similarly. I've seen program after program come into my home town just for the administrators to pack up and leave town 1-2 years in, blaming everyone but themselves. It's very refreshing to see someone who "wants to make the world better" actually doing it rather than paying lip service with the real goal of boosting their ego. Hope this is legit. Tip my hat to LeBron for being a real hero to the underserv…

Thanks for sharing your stories.

It would be nice if such administrators and bureaucrats somehow had some skin in the game. Unfortunately, like you say "paying lip service" looks like it often wins out in America's public schools, and our children and future is what suffers.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#132

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

wallace_f wrote: post #131
thatoneuser wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up similarly. I've seen program after program come into my home town just for the administrators to pack up and leave town 1-2 years in, blaming everyone but themselves. It's very refreshing to see someone who "wants to make the world better" actually doing it rather than paying lip service with the real goal of boosting their ego. Hope this is legit. Tip my hat to LeBron for being a real hero to the underserv…

Thanks for sharing your stories. It would be nice if such administrators and bureaucrats somehow had some skin in the game. Unfortunately, like you say "paying lip service" looks like it often wins out in America's public schools, and our children and future is what suffers.

The people promoting these schools are only out to line their pockets with sweet voucher money by selling ineffective books and teaching materials. The schools are set up to fail from the start because they're just a means to extract profits.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#133

Post by fillskills »

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #64

Of course it was going to be a success. Most other approaches that approached intergenerational poverty via the three pronged approach of better child care, housing, and economic opportunity has work to great success. The school doesn't try to solve all 3 at once, but the approach to child care makes the other much easier to manage for parents.

Wonder if such a 3 pronged approach can be applied to integration of immigrants.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#134

Post by hopler »

owyn wrote: post #101
jonknee wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funding varies wildy based on location as it comes from local property taxes. Not all schools would need such increases. Thanks to that local funding scheme, the US tends to spend the most on the kids that need it the least.

Right, implicit but unsaid was the thought that the federal gov't could cover that funding gap so that all schools got the same budget regardless of the local conditions. Of course given the political forces that created the current local conditions in the first place, that's probably unlikely too.

Even state governments could solve the funding gap between schools.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#135

Post by ghda »

krastanov wrote: post #126
s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when you get bad kids that don't care about their grades that distract the good kids and prevent them from learning. Ideally the teacher could bring them all up to the same pace, but at a certain point it's on the parent. In some cases you do need separation. I always enjoyed my GT (gifted and talented, separated classes from 1st grade to 8th) and AP (dual credit college/highschool 9-12th grade) classes…

Yeah, I feel the same way from my personal experience as a kid, but from what I have read, the "bad kids" thesis you suggested is at least partially fallacious. Again, as an example, Finland seems to disprove it.

I don’t know if Finland as an example really proves or disproves anything. Finland is a small, homogeneous, and pretty unusual sort of country, and the fact that they happen to do well in certain standardised tests doesn’t mean that anything in particular they’re doing is optimised.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#136

Post by tomhoward »

_lessthan0 wrote: post #45

Top comments, shock people cant feel good about something because it didnt happen to them. I was hoping for some uplifting commentary but like all other social media sites HN is going down a bad path.

Can you link to the comments you think are so terrible? Most people seem supportive.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#137

Post by fiblye »

ghda wrote: post #135
krastanov wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I feel the same way from my personal experience as a kid, but from what I have read, the "bad kids" thesis you suggested is at least partially fallacious. Again, as an example, Finland seems to disprove it.

I don’t know if Finland as an example really proves or disproves anything. Finland is a small, homogeneous, and pretty unusual sort of country, and the fact that they happen to do well in certain standardised tests doesn’t mean that anything in particular they’re doing is optimised.

This.

Asian schools are great at providing high test scores. Their rigid education really drills the information into the kids and works well.

But that incredible strictness simply would not work with most American children. The culture is simply incompatible with the strict discipline involved (and that’s not to say it’s bad, but only different).

America’s trouble is that there are some majorly divided cultures living together, all under the label of “American”. What works for some people just won’t work for others.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#138

Post by _qbjt »

vvpan wrote: post #81
_qbjt wrote: post #71

This story resonates with me deeply. I grew up in a lower income, single parent household to a family environment plagued with drug addiction and feelings of economic hopelessness. I was on track to drop out by my senior year of high school. My father (who was always in and out of prison) committed suicide my freshman year of high school. I was distraught but blessed. My English teacher at the time noticed what I was…

AVID has information on their website but in your own words could you describe how it helped you? Very curious.

Great question. I can't speak to AVID's practices today (it's been over 10 years... damn I'm old) but for me it created a much-needed structure. Students within the program could take AVID variants of core classes similar to how they might enroll in Honors or AP. The curriculum favored collaborative exercises like group projects and peer review. The idea was to encourage many of the social and professional tools we often take for granted (collective problem solving, resource management, etc.) to at-risk students. We also had regular one-on-ones with instructors within the program who would track our academic performance and help guide us along the way. Finally, higher education was a major focus of the program and took the form of anything from SAT prep sessions to projects where we would have to research colleges and universities we planned to apply to as part of the assignment.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#139

Post by mindfulplay »

whatshisface wrote: post #66
mindfulplay wrote: post #61

It's a shame that a private citizen has do this. Reflects poorly on our country that the economically disadvantaged really do not have a choice or a voice. And these are not people who choose to be poor or incapable. They really don't have any other option.

You could also say that it reflects well on our country that a private citizen was able to realize that something needed to be done differently, and then make the change themselves instead of hassling through a decades-long "change the bureaucracy" adventure while competing with seven other equally motivated individuals who also want to change the education system, but in completely different ways...

That's true but I have higher hopes for our country's politicians.

Re: LeBron James school that was considered an experiment is showing promise

#140

Post by sudhirj »

They're pretty public about their "secret sauce", which is to offer a pretty neat ladder up Maslow's pyramid, especially for the parents.

Any family worried about food / clothes can come into the pantry and take whatever they need. Physiological needs, check. Barbershop available. That's really interesting.

Safety needs: see above, with heavy emphasis on dealing with conflict situations. Celebrate coming to school, make sure it's always a safe place, extra hours and days to keep them off the streets.

Belonging and love: everyone in the school are the "chosen ones", they have a tribe, the teachers are on their side, the parents are involved and accountable.

If you handle the first three levels for a person, hitting self esteem, accomplishment (at a personal level, need not be state's best or world's best) can come much easier, even with average quality of teaching. They're also making the parents baseline role models (they clean, clothed, putting food on the table and looking into their own self improvement) and plastering the environment with a topline role model LeBron James (if he can do it you could at least try as hard as he did).

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