The Latest Crime Wave: Sending Your Child to a Better School

Any other policy serves only to preserve the inequality of the education offered between districts.

"almost all of their time trying prevent a riot from breaking out"

is quite similar to what I wrote with:

"The best can hope for from a K-12 school is that it will do no harm.

"Find a school that has a nice 'social atmosphere' and otherwise is RELAXED, e.g., with as little homework as possible."

So we are at least partly agreeing.

What to do about a school with knife fights in the classrooms, drug deals in the halls, and pimping at lunch time is to get the hell out: Such a school fails on "do no harm" and "a nice 'social atmosphere'".

If just have to leave and can't afford a wealthy neighborhood, then pick a small town in a rural, farming area in one of the more northern states; there essentially any school will do no harm.

Also good, pick a college town. Even if sweep floors, flip burgers, wash pots, and act as a security guard, will be able to do a terrific job getting children ready for college and life.

My good news is that don't have to move to some neighborhood with all millionaires. Instead, quite sufficient is JUST "do no harm" and a 'social atmosphere'. Academically relaxed is also good.

This is a radical recommendation: For good work in actually learning for college and life, mostly don't depend on the school. Don't mostly depend on the school even if in one of the best school districts in the country or even are sending children to one of the best private schools.

Why? Again, yet again, to repeat, bluntly the K-12 teachers don't know enough to teach much of anything to be taken very seriously. The K-12 years are some of the very best years for learning, and it is a grand disaster that those years are turned over to the K-12 system and, thus, largely wasted.

Also implied but not stated was, get the heck into college level material ASAP. In the US, the good academic material starts in college and continues into graduate and professional school. K-12 is wildly different and, academically, is a really bad joke -- mostly can just skip it. For most parents who want good education for their children, this is radical but good advice.

With my advice, careful parents, and a one-room school house in a serious, rural farming community will totally knock the socks off ANYTHING in formal K-12 education.

For your:

"Also, it can be very hard to support real learning at home if you are a single parent working two or three jobs to make ends meet."

True.

So: (1) Young people, listen up: Work however hard is necessary to form stable marriages and, really, stable, larger families. Marriages and families are IMPORTANT. Again, listen up.

(2) Unless you want a series of disasters for the rest of your life, delay having children until you can form a stable marriage.

(3) In the home, set up a 'culture' of learning instead of TV, cars, fashion frocks, popularity competitions, cell phone gossip, pop culture, fast food, sports, wild parties, etc.

Then, get the children started and going on learning, largely independently, ASAP. Then the children can learn on their own time with minimal time from parents, so little that there still is a chance for a single parent.

But this matter of a 'culture' of learning is just CRUCIAL. If there is any doubt about the culture in your home, then disconnect the TV. Keep children away from 'pop culture'. Emphasize LEARNING and, then, curiosity.

Would it be moral, do you think, for a parent in Nazi German to lie when asked if their child was half Jewish in order to prevent the child from being taken away to the concentration camps? In my mind, it would -- and it would be a good lesson for the child: that truth is LESS important than saving a human life.

Now suppose that the situation were more starkly clear-cut than it is here. Suppose that the jack-booted thugs knocked on the door and demanded to know whether your child was A or B. If A, then the child would get an excellent education and have an opportunity to demonstrate their potential in life. If B, then the child would receive no education beyond 5th grade and would be prohibited for the remainder of their life from making a living in any profession other than drug dealer. I don't know about you, but in this case too I would think it moral to lie and claim A when the child was actually B. This lie hurts no one, and it saves a human's potential, if not technically their life. I even think it would make a good life lesson for the child.

What about this case? The extremists may think that the choice of urban or suburban school IS a case of "chance in life" vs "drug dealer", but the reality is much less clear cut. Some people who attend poor urban schools DO succeed in spite of the disadvantages. But many more of them do not. The lie may not be justified in this case. But if you agreed with me on one or both of the hypothetical cases above, then you should see that it is a matter of degree, NOT a stark absolute -- a decision that requires careful consideration of the degree of institutional injustice that your lie serves to combat, and a decision that persons of wisdom and ethics may disagree on.

My friend was diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities as a child, and attended a school for people like him. Classes were small, teachers understood and he learned how to write and do math as well as an ordinary person- great results for someone with his long list of disabilities.

On the other hand, I aced an exam to go to a very selective school. Teachers pushed every kid there to do their best, and I learned how to speak, write, debate, program and do math at a level far beyond what I would have otherwise. Sure, I would have come out of my high school years knowing a lot about math no matter what school I attended, but I wouldn't have learned anything about how one should speak or debate, nor would I have learned how to write well.

I think that's the way to go- push kids as far as they can go. This is a lot easier when teachers know how far they can push, which is where results- based stratification ( something I, at least, consider synonymous to merit-based) comes in.