The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#291

Post by dec0dedab0de » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #210

car_analogy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets…

Knowing nothing about this topic other than hearsay and the opinions of my elderly parents… both of them teachers in public high schools… Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not w…

Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated?

No, school budgets only help the schools, they don't solve any other problems.

it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not white and already wealthy a complete and utter shambles.

Maybe I'm older, but it seems to me the exact opposite is happening. Over the last 40 years there has been an increasing number of minority families that have moved to wealthier, historically white neighborhoods. I think this is because of education, affirmative action, and a general shift of society to be less racist.

How can we expect decent, equitable outcomes given that the home life of significant percentages of students is essentially a path right to prison?

nobody has ever expected that.

There is still a lot of work to be done, but things have been moving in the right direction for a while now. It took a few hundred years to get here, don't expect it to be fixed in just over half a century.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#292

Post by zozbot234 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

hn_version_0023 wrote: post #210

car_analogy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this means is the wealthier localities have more tax revenue and thus better schools. This is an oft repeated myth. In addition to property taxes, school funding is supplemented by state and federal budgets…

Knowing nothing about this topic other than hearsay and the opinions of my elderly parents… both of them teachers in public high schools… Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated? Because it seems to me we’ve been acting with intent as a society to keep the families, homes, and communities of everyone not w…

> Do these per-pupil funding numbers have any meaning when your home and community are broken and one or both of your parents is an addict or incarcerated?

It's a vicious cycle, which can only be broken by building strong communities in those places. And we've mostly forgotten how to do this, because "lifestyle anarchism" has been way more popular than a genuine community orientation among intellectuals and influencers, since the 1960s or so. School funding is a band-aid.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#293

Post by corrral » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

bsuvc wrote: post #252

corrral wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid. People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.

Why is the work environment terrible?

Ever had a 3rd grader threaten to stab you, and look like they really mean it? A second grader call you the c-word? That kind of thing happening basically every day, often multiple times a day?

Credible threats of gang violence on a regular basis. School-wide lockdowns with some regularity due to threats of violence, or violence that has actually occurred. Admin with extremely limited options to deal with any of this, and having to triage their discipline pretty hard, plus having little to no support from home to back any of it up (this is why the stuff in the first paragraph happens constantly—no time or community/parental willpower to deal with it, given the rest of what's going on). Watching the kids suffering from the same shit day after day, plus all the usually-awful stuff they have going on at home, and not being able to do much about it. Seeing kids die or end up in the hospital with alarming regularity. Distressingly young kids plainly high or drunk in class.

Not many people can do that without burning out or giving up and half-assing everything, very quickly.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#294

Post by panda88888 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

bsuvc wrote: post #252

corrral wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid. People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.

Why is the work environment terrible?

From what I’ve heard one of the biggest reason is students and parents who don’t care about education at all, who would actively disrupt others from learning and the teacher from teaching.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#295

Post by derac » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

minsc_and_boo wrote: post #242

derac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? Why don't we remove basketball courts from inner cities and cut off black kid's feet /s eye roll BTW, I realize he is arguing for the opposite of this. edit: If you think I am racist or something let me spell it out as I did in another comment: It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable whe…

>Unacceptably white is still a horrible way to phrase this. Is the NBA unacceptably black? This statement is a textbook syllogistic fallacy. It ignores the qualification context for being gifted vs. being in the NBA. There are a number of historically exclusive systems, prejudiced on socioeconomic and racial standards, that are required prerequisites for being in a gifted school, which do not exist for being in the N…

No. It is not unacceptable when white children have opportunities. It is unacceptable when black children do not.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#296

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

bsuvc wrote: post #252

corrral wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city, the worst schools tend to pay a good 20% better than the best ones, for teachers. They get lots of federal and state aid. People still usually prefer not to work at them, if they have options, because the work environment is terrible.

Why is the work environment terrible?

[deleted]

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#297

Post by somethoughts » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:46 PM UTC

citizenkeen wrote: post #156

WalterBright wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been convinced that more money for schools produces better results. Sure, that means nicer buildings, but how does that improve education? In Washington State, the teachers finally got their "fully funding" proposal enacted, which was supposed to solve all the funding problems, including big raises for teachers. There's been zero change in results.

My MIL is a teacher, and she's taught at wealthy schools and poor schools. Wealthy schools have more money, but they actually often have less - if a school's average socio-economic class drops below a certain point, there's a slew of federal funding available and she often had more resources in a poor school than a wealthy one. The poorest schools are often the middle-class - those too wealthy to qualify for the fund…

Anec-datally this rings true to me. I think in wealthier neighborhoods there is also a lot more competitiveness for PTA and school board seats from parents who are very highly credentialed (i.e. MBA, former product managers, lawyers) that have electively taken time off/early retirement to have more quality time with their kids. There's some sort of institutional knowledge coming from the business world on how to run effective meetings, run a fundraiser, etc.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#298

Post by danans » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #232

danans wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much more expensive to teach and support the children at lower performing schools than it is at higher performing schools. Lower performing schools are also providing significant front line social support services for the communities they serve, including food, trauma counseling, sometimes medical intervention, extreme behavior management. None of that is cheap. Students/families at higher performing schools ha…

The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas. Not all of that additional per-pupil funding makes it to the classroom.

> The lower performing schools also tend to be older and require more maintenance and repairs than newer schools in wealthier areas.

Sure, that's a factor too, but I'd still call it a social service issue since it ultimately results from the historical disinvestment in the communities that today have low performing schools.

There are reasons that the roofs didn't get repaired and the lead pipes didn't get replaced in those schools: because middle income people took their lives, businesses, and tax dollars out of those communities starting in the late 1960s, both by migrating to newly built suburbs, and also by ensuring their tax dollars never went toward the communities they left.

Look up the opposition to "Robin Hood" school funding from the 80s and 90s. Where I grew up it was largely about keeping suburban tax dollars out of inner-city school districts.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#299

Post by mrtranscendence » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

cyberlurker wrote: post #97

jmyeet wrote: post #51

There are so many topics that are hard to talk about nowadays without getting into politics but politics and structural inequality are at the core of this. For the benefit of non-US readers, know that how the US funds public education (K-12) is rather unique. It's done through property taxes essentially. Depending on your state and city your property taxes can vary a lot with the same value property. But what this me…

In NYC they also flatten all Asians into one group and say the “gifted” programs aren't diverse enough because a high percentage are Asian. As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages… Also you nailed it on the property tax point. Often overlooked as the biggest issue with education. A similar sized home in a good school district ca…

> As if implying Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. all have the same life experience, cultures, advantages, disadvantages…

Though it's not as if Asian students are a perfect mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Filipino, etc. Given demographic trends most of them are going to be Chinese, with a smaller amount Korean.

Re: The case for expanding rather than eliminating gifted education programs (2021)

#300

Post by MisterBastahrd » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 5:47 PM UTC

zmgsabst wrote: post #21

jeremyjh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the part where he pointed out that black/brown students are 66% less likely to be in a gifted program with the same test scores ?

Is that because the program discriminates or because their family lacks awareness of such programs? Those have very different solutions.

Schools literally send home papers to parents and communicate with them directly about the programs. Most school districts require parental permission before children are pulled out of class to be tested.