241–250 of 764 posts
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Doesn't that mean they fail first year instead?
They’ll ban failing next you watch (they’ve already basically done this with No Child Left Behind).
NCLB didn't do that, and expired in 2007.
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> Do we have any data on the correlation between high-school admission criteria and inventing the Covid vaccine or whatever? Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes. https://www.caltech.edu/about/legacy/awards-and-honors/nobel... BTW, I think the mRNA vaccine technology is worthy of a Nobel Prize. Don't you?
> Caltech requires good grades as criteria for admission. Caltech graduates have a disproportionately high percentage of Nobel prizes. Caltech requires 10-year-old kids to write essays? Again, are we talking about enrolling 10-year-old kids in highschool or are we talking about hiring microbiologists?
Second, people don't suddenly learn how to write a competent essay at the last minute. Writing a good one is a combination of many skills learned over many years.
BTW, I did not take any college prep courses prior to Caltech, and found myself way behind the other freshman who did. I found out many years later that the admissions committee had taken a chance on me, and they were very nearly wrong. I came that close to flunking out.
If public schools dump their gifted tracks, inequality will only increase as the top schools will wind up drawing only from private schools.
One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.
In France folks send their kids to public school mostly. The best high school in the country are public. And usually it’s a sign of something weird if you do your high school in the private.
All that being said. Money always find a way. Some optional curriculum become the key to get assign to the « right » high school.
like learning Latin, Greek. Or picking less common language, outside of the Spanish/English classics. like Italian or German.
I really hope we move back home before my kids are old enough to go to school.
This sounds like something out of a surrealist novel. > consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes US-International keyboard layout, maybe. Maybe the student doesn't know what umlauts and acute accents are, so maybe they think they're valid equivalents to " and '.
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No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.
> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-…
In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions.
Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally).
Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit.
But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)
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You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling. It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.
Or maybe you don't understand California law. Most homeschooling families stay legal by registering as a private school. Source: I homeschooled my sons in California for several years and participated on various homeschooling lists at the time.
> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we g…
Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, a…
Just make the grading period 6 or 9 weeks instead of a "semester".
To be fair, I've never heard of a school that didn't do that. Is this a San Francisco thing?
And, to be 100% fair, if I were teaching this year, I would probably not want to fail anyone, even if I really felt they deserved it.
If you're in my class in person, I can control the environment (mostly). I'll take responsibility if you need to be failed.
However, I wouldn't have taken responsibility for anything this past year given the total chaos and complete lack of support from the school systems.
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Of course, but it is very much up to the parents which product they want to buy (another problem of private schools to be sure). There are several that focus on rigorous academics, language immersion and even world travel.
They don't necessarily know what is marketing and what they are buying, and the few truly top schools are selective. Private school teachers are also paid less & have worse benefits. It would be great if the private system had it all figured out but they don't.
The main advantage private schools have is they an expel problem students and let the public schools try to handle them.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X1878563...
Hell, voucher programs have been shown to lower academic attainment. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21839
If people really wanted to improve educational outcomes, UBI might actually do the most good. The situation at home matters a lot, and it shows up in the data.
Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they're just going to pass students anyways, what's the point of increasing the funding?
That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child. "Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021…
Lol what?
What on earth do they do with that money? You could hire a private tutor per four children for that money and have them do it in the children's homes.
Would end up as a private tutor half-time for two-child families, with them doing homework the other half-time. If you had four children it'd be full-time!