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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

#141

Post by azernik »

sudhirj wrote: post #140

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, m…

The inclusion of a barbershop is very much an African-American cultural thing - these are traditional male social gathering places in that society. So this is probably not just providing a haircut, but also some things a bit higher up the Maslow hierarchy like that belonging you mentioned.

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

#142

Post by bzbarsky »

istjohn wrote: post #118
thatoneuser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um so what about the endless govt programs out there that were supposed to achieve things like this brat have failed? It's not like our country doesn't do anything - it's a very complex problem. There are efforts and they tend to have mediocre results at best. I've personally worked in some of these programs and the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disad…

It's not really that hard though. It just takes money that we're unwilling to spend. Money for lead abatement, healthcare, early childhood education, summer programs, athletics, healthy school lunches, air conditioned classrooms, high-skilled and highly-paid teachers, intervention programs for at-risk youth, addiction treatment, school counselors, etc., etc. Basically, poor kids need all the stuff middle class kids t…

It's not just a matter of spending money.

As a simple example, per the numbers cited at http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/District_Dossier/2014/10/stud... DC public schools spend a good bit more per student that neighboring Montgomery County, MD. The schools in Montgomery County are quite a bit better in terms of most of the things you list, except perhaps addiction treatment and at-risk intervention programs (about which I can't speak usefully; I don't know much about the state of them in Montgomery County).

Now DC is a pretty dysfunctional case in terms of the ineffectiveness of its spending. If I compare all the numbers being cited here to the numbers for Chicago Public Schools that https://www.illinoispolicy.org/cps-to-spend-an-additional-20... mentions (which are easily 3x lower), it seems pretty clear to me that more money would in fact help improve CPS pretty drastically. And there are certainly lots of places in the US that are in the same situation as CPS.

On the other hand, you also have the numbers in https://nypost.com/2017/06/14/ny-spends-more-money-per-stude... which has NYC schools at almost $22k per student, with somewhat mixed results. It's pretty common for suburban school districts to spend a good bit less than that with results that are comparable or better, for a variety of reasons.

All of which is to say that there are some school districts where money would definitely help, some where fixing the systemic mismanagement of the large amounts of money already being spent would help more, and some where it's not clear what would help the most...

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

#143

Post by bzbarsky »

randomacct3847 wrote: post #114

Isn’t it obvious that funding public schools with local property taxes is what has created this messed up system where your zip code has a disproportionate impact on the quality of your education?

Just about every single state has state-level funding for schools that acts to even out those disparities.

Worse yet, spending (per pupil) on its own turns out to not be a very good predictor of quality of education. It doesn't even seem to be a great predictor if you control for parents' SES, from what I can see for various school districts in Boston's suburbs.

Put another way, a number of quite distressed school districts spend more than various "good" school districts, with much worse results. DC public schools are a poster child here, but not the only example by any means. So it's not just a matter of funding levels at all.

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

#144

Post by externalreality »

istjohn wrote: post #122
externalreality wrote: post #88

This a good thing! I am 100% in support of James' endeavor here. However, students doing better when put in a better environment should not be surprising. I was a lower income student who was shipped across town to a majority white school as a anti-segregation program that was brokered with a federal oversight committee. The African Americans in that school were treated quite bad. My first day at school I was labeled…

If I can ask, how do you feel about the program that bussed you across town, overall? Do you feel you benefited on net despite the exposure to the racism, or would you prefer to have stayed in your neighborhood school if you could do it all again?

istjohn, I deeply appreciate your question. I've been sitting here for over an hour trying to answer so I'll just answer simply. Yes, I would rather have gone to a school in my neighborhood. I would have rather been around other African American and LatinX students than to have learned what it is to be neglected and to feel inferior @ 4.5 years old. No question.

Please don't use my response as an argument in support of segregation. That would be purely evil and disgusting.

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

#145

Post by azernik »

fillskills wrote: post #133
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.

Worked pretty well in early Israel. Generally it's an interesting study model, in that it saw and continues to see absorption of (Jewish) immigrants as a national mission, not just an unwelcome burden.

It includes what's essentially a full-time salary to study Hebrew for 6 months, subsidized housing for a year, subsidized daycare, job counseling, and assorted miscellaneous benefits. Not always sufficiently funded, but the basic model is endorsed.

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

#146

Post by azernik »

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.

Also includes some direct economic benefits for parents - e.g. the food/clothes pantry mentioned, where parents can have basic needs taken care of without payment.

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

#147

Post by bsder »

collective-intl wrote: post #128
b_tterc_p wrote: post #41

I like the concept. I’m not sure their stats check out. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in. The article suggests a lot of the kids here were bottom percentile performers on standardized tests (literal 1th percentile). I do wonder if the test is valid at scores that poor. Could it be that the bottom percentile is just the kids who guessed randomly and had bad luck, as opposed to, say, the ninth percentile w…

I think there is a major flaw which you are getting at. If you take the students who performed at the 10th-25th percentile in any school in one year, on average they would do better the next year because of reversion to the mean. The way to understand it is that the population they chose did so poorly on their test last year, it is likely that they did worse than they usually do. They are more likely to have had an o…

> Any school which is claiming really great results pretty much never holds up.

That actually isn't true.

We know (we have had multiple state programs demonstrate in real programs) what works in the elementary to early middle crowd--roughly $15,000-$16,000 per pupil spent on the worst performers sustained every single year will bring the worst performers closer to mean ever year. Even the Gates foundation documented this.

We simply do not have the political will to put it into broad action.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by Ma8ee »

verisimilidude wrote: post #120
thatoneuser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um so what about the endless govt programs out there that were supposed to achieve things like this brat have failed? It's not like our country doesn't do anything - it's a very complex problem. There are efforts and they tend to have mediocre results at best. I've personally worked in some of these programs and the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disad…

> the reality is govt just isn't well suited for the nuance and individual attention/thought different disadvantaged groups require This is a solved problem in other countries. Finland is a good example. Their education system focuses on equality above all: all kids are going to have access to the same educational opportunities, even if equality comes at the cost of quality. As part of this idea, privately funded sch…

> Guess what happens when rich people must send their kids to public schools

This was my greatest concerned, which unfortunately proved true, when we introduced private schools in Sweden: previously if your kid didn't get a good education you had to try to improve the school. So the efforts of the resourceful parents helped the kids with less resourceful parents. Now when people are unhappy with their kids education they just send them to a different school, leaving the disadvantaged kids behind in schools that no one cares about trying to improve.

And I understand from an American perspective that sounds normal. But for me that is no way to build a society.

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