Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 • Hacker News Board

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#261

Post by paulpauper » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #227

dnndev wrote: post #155

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school. All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school. Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my e…

>National Merit Scholar

Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#262

Post by bombcar » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

an_opabinia wrote: post #24

underseacables wrote: post #4

This is sad. It reads more as though teachers and school employees are doing whatever they can to keep/justify their jobs, but not to improve learning. It is almost as if a teachers first job is self-preservation. If students can’t pass the test, then the test must be made easier, that way more students can pass and the teacher doesn’t look bad.

> Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period— it’s so early, you know!— and during fourth period I don't know. What does this have to do with keeping teacher's jobs and not improving learning? Late start is, as far as "clinical outcomes" can be measured in education, like, the cheapest win there is.

Moving to late start may help with the chronically late - but it doesn’t solve the intentionally tardy and the scofflaws.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#263

Post by bombcar » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:23 PM UTC

wilde wrote: post #249

There are a lot of complaints about public school in this thread, but much of the data on achievement says that in the US, private schools don’t do a better job. 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 go…

Forbidding single-parent homes and demanding only one parent work would also improve outcomes but I doubt the political will for those can be found.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#264

Post by FabHK » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #98

ipaddr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.

Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT

Are the UCs ignoring the SAT, or making it optional?

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#265

Post by hef19898 » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

dnndev wrote: post #188

Bostonian wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We need more teachers and smaller classes." That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.

Another approach could be: High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.

A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#266

Post by bombcar » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:25 PM UTC

arkh wrote: post #115

> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t. There must a good way to describe this "school t…

Usurious student debt should be mandated at 0% interest and only paid back via a percentage of income. And such this would require it be issued by the state (as no company would want to) and you could tune it so that it would have to be paid back in 15 years (say) or be forgiven - and so offering it to people likely to end up in middling income jobs wouldn’t be worth while.

And make it so that if it doesn’t get paid back the college is the one out the money, too. And suddenly the problem solves itself quite quickly.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#267

Post by Shacklz » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

ArkanExplorer wrote: post #235

Ivdg3 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fundamental problem is that formal schooling is basically a waste of time for a reasonable fraction of the population. Do you need any more than basic literacy and numeracy to be a retail worker, cook, laborer, driver? These students would be much better off learning a hands-on trade, or in the workforce. The school leaving and employment age should be moved to 14. Expulsions should also be properly enforced, inc…

This is kind of the approach that Switzerland is taking (disclaimer; I'm Swiss), although I would not formulate it as drastically. It depends a bit on the region but school is required until 14-ish, after that there's a split for "gymnasium", which is continued full-time-school, around 20% of the students do this (again, varies by region). The remaining 80% start an "apprenticeship", where they work 40-60% on a job, and spend the rest of the time in school (where there's about a 50-50 split between general education and job-specific education). Whenever someone doing an apprenticeship figures out that he wants to go back towards higher education, there are plenty of routes to do so.

In my opinion it works quite nicely. The 80-20-split for gymnasium (which requires an entry-exam, but again, region-dependant) ensures a certain level for students in gymnasium, and the "job schools" for the apprenticeships allow for job-specific education. All in all, I consider it a pretty decent system.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#268

Post by wutbrodo » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:27 PM UTC

> Meanwhile, here’s what it’s like in the teacher email threads. This is a verbatim, non-ironic quote: “I didn’t really hear you at first, steeped as I am in a culture of assumed patriarchal white privilege, rank privilege, and inequitable hierarchy"

It's my perception that adults involved with schools, especially younger grades, have been penetrated so intensely by woke ideology[1], much more so than the broader subcultures (urban, educated, etc) they belong to that already skew woke. Is this just down to how skewed female this group is?

[1] I mean this neutrally, not as a particular criticism of wokeness or the manner in which it penetrates communities. When thinking about large groups of people, modeling ideologies as memetic viruses moving through a population is a lot more sensible than as emergent entities from the rational decisions of large numbers of intelligent, thoughtful people capable of critical thinking.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#269

Post by gregimba » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

geoduck14 wrote: post #232

throwaway6734 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands Spending per pupil can be a deceiving statistic due to the vastly different needs between poor/middle-class/wealthy students

For people not aware of the geography referenced here: Leander and The Woodlands are both affluent areas outside of the major cities referenced. I would suggest that the students here are doing well due to a combo of the following factors: Smart parents live here, and they have smart kids Rich parents spend less time fretting about paying bills and more time helping kids with homework One (rich) parent works, one sta…

As someone who lives in Leander, I would say Westlake is the affluent area of Austin and Leander is the up and coming suburban middle to upper middle class area. Leander ISD has some great schools and some bad schools and historically wasn't great.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#270

Post by dane-pgp » Sat, Jun 19, 2021, 11:29 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #120

antihero wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group. Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools…

> and making the resources available to those schools available How would you do this? It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible . Equally it seems impossible to force the people who would have chosen teaching careers at private schools to work at comprehensive schools. That, and the fact that one of the ‘resources’ that private scho…

> It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.

Fortunately it is possible to do something very similar, though, which is to tax the group of people who have the level of income that would allow them to send their kids to private school had it been possible.

I suppose you're saying that some people currently are wealthy enough to send their kids to private school, but choose not to (or don't have kids at all). These people wouldn't have a choice about paying the extra taxes that enable these better-funded comprehensive schools. This isn't a new problem, though, as childless people already pay taxes that are spent on existing comprehensive schools.

As for "decisions outside the comprehensive school system", I think that needs to be considered in the context of the government's existing regulation of private schools and the trend of academisation:

https://www.bbc.com/news/education-13274090