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Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

nytimes.com

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Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#81

Post by HDThoreaun »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #73
linuxftw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If public schools weren't awful, there would be no need for charter schools. The public school experiment has failed.

Tell me you only follow policy in the US without telling me: exhibit one. The public school “experiment” has been purposefully sabotaged is more like it.

My district spends $29k per student. More than almost any other in the world. Yet some of its schools are so bad that a quarter of high schoolers opted out. It's not about funding. It's an overwhelmingly blue area, politicians are not purposefully sabotaging the schools. The government is just utterly incompetent, and worse, corrupt. And unfortunately many of the students are from households that don't emphasize the importance of education.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#82

Post by ryan93 »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #20

> “The military isn’t perfect — there is still racism in the military,” said Leslie Hinkson, a former Georgetown University sociologist who studied integration in Defense Department schools. But what is distinctive, she said, “is this access to resources in a way that isn’t racialized.” Racism in the military is a career ender for officers and enlisted kind of like getting a DUI but worse. What is more in the system…

Are you purposefully not mentioning the IQ cutoffs the military uses for soldiers. it has been as high as the 50th percentile for the air force.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#83

Post by anarticle »

ethbr1 wrote: post #50
anarticle wrote: post #38

DoD schools person here, a major point left out of this article is that if you do something bad enough in school your parent's CO will be notified and this can have real career results. In a foreign country you can get deported if you do something stupid enough to warrant it. I went to several DoD and civilian schools, NC (dod), NJ (civ), Erie PA (civ), Okinawa (dod), NJ (civ). I would say the standards are higher in…

Do you feel you faced any detrimental challenges your non-military family peers didn't, as you made the transition from high school to college? If so, what? Have a child soon to be in a similar situation, so any thoughts helpful.

The major benefit/challenge of being a military kid that moved every 2-3y is that you make friends really fast and resocialize very easily. This also means you don't have any roots. My example is often that my friends in high school were friends since kindergarten, something I have no frame of reference for. It probably only hurt in high school for sports and clique based activities.

For going from highschool to college there is almost zero negative, since it's the nth time you've moved and had to rebuild a social structure.

Consider the number of total school changes for an average domestic student is 3. K-5, 6-8, 9-12, and in those cases they keep their friend groups.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#84

Post by HDThoreaun »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #39
HDThoreaun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're…

> Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. If you kick out the problematic students, the only students you have left are easy to teach non-problematic students. > and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will…

> It isn't mysterious: you selected the best students, so your results will be the best.

You're implying that individual results don't change by grouping the good students together. In your vision the good students stay good and the bad stay bad. I don't agree. The good students become great by surrounding them with other good students.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#85

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sokoloff wrote: post #74
sgnelson wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is going to say "offering parents more choices is bad." But the political reality is not simply "offering more choices." The political reality typically entails using funds set aside for public schools for charter schools. In reality, what happens all too often is that funding and resources are stripped away from the already resource poor schools and given to charter schools. And that's probably…

> entails using funds set aside for public schools That’s one framing. Another framing is “using funds set aside to educate the children of the district”. If you frame the funding as being for the schools rather than for the children’s education , you naturally object to it being spent elsewhere. Are we trying to run public schools or trying to educate children in the district? (My kids attended public schools.)

Segregationists tried using that framing back in the 1960s/70s, but it the argument was ruled invalid by the Warren-led Supreme Court. Who knows what would happen these days, however.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#86

Post by pharmakom »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #17
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #8

I think this can be misleading in the same way some charter school results are. The easiest way to improve a school's results isn't to improve the education provided, it's to get rid of the worst performing kids. Charter schools do this by various selection effects, and artificial barriers, like ending at noon on a Wednesday. So the only kids who go there have two parents, one who probably is stay at home and can pic…

Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're…

> Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools.

This is going to require some backing.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#87

Post by hospadar »

etempleton wrote: post #68
colechristensen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?". But what should we do with the rest?

In the US it used to be more acceptable to put students in classes based on where they were academically and in terms of behavior. Truly disruptive kids were also usually suspended until eventually being expelled. Neither approach is considered appropriate anymore. It was a central thesis of No Child Left Behind, which is/was nice in theory, but not in practice. Now schools are data obsessed. Bad metrics like suspens…

> The reality is that if you want good schools you need to cut your losses with the worst behaving kids.

This kind of attitude is a wide-open door for racist and classist attitudes to penalize kids of color, kids from poor homes, kids with unsafe or unstable home situations. Suspending and expelling kids almost always makes things worse for those kids.

There are HUGE racial and gender disparities in the rates of suspension and expulsion[1].

Anecdotally, I know a lot of educators and child social workers who are strongly opposed to suspension & expulsion as a punishment or a "solution". None of them cite "metrics obsession" as their reason, but rather the fact that the kids who are getting kicked out of school need more support, not less.

Maybe it seems fine to kick [other people's] kids out of school "for the good of the many", but happens next? What if parents loose their job because they have to stay home for childcare? What if folks end up homeless because they can't pay the bills? What if those kids end up in prisons (that our taxes pay for)? Just from a financial perspective, school is an EXTREMELY cost-effective early intervention compared to prisons, inpatient mental health, welfare systems, etc. Well educated folks often end up making money and paying into tax systems rather than drawing from them.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rda.as...

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#88

Post by pharmakom »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #81
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me you only follow policy in the US without telling me: exhibit one. The public school “experiment” has been purposefully sabotaged is more like it.

My district spends $29k per student. More than almost any other in the world. Yet some of its schools are so bad that a quarter of high schoolers opted out. It's not about funding. It's an overwhelmingly blue area, politicians are not purposefully sabotaging the schools. The government is just utterly incompetent, and worse, corrupt. And unfortunately many of the students are from households that don't emphasize the…

> More than almost any other in the world.

You should only compare to countries with a similar cost structure.

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#89

Post by throwaway101223 »

sgnelson wrote: post #67
ameminator wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. Maybe the public school system is failing its students. However, it always seemed unfair to trap parents who would otherwise have other options in a failing system. Yes, this does suck for the children of uncaring parents - but for the parents who DO care, shouldn't they have a means of meeting their obligation…

I don't think anyone is going to say "offering parents more choices is bad." But the political reality is not simply "offering more choices." The political reality typically entails using funds set aside for public schools for charter schools. In reality, what happens all too often is that funding and resources are stripped away from the already resource poor schools and given to charter schools. And that's probably…

> In reality, what happens all too often is that funding and resources are stripped away from the already resource poor schools and given to charter schools.

Where are you seeing this? D.C. has almost half of its students in charter schools, and it also has public schools that are funded more than almost anywhere else in the U.S.

Worth pointing out that the charter school enrollment is highest in the poorest wards with the greatest percent of the black population. It’s lowest in the richest wards with the greatest percent of the whtie population. See for yourself[1].

Like with the claims of “underfunded public schools,” a lot of these conversations seem to stem from people hearing talking points and assuming that they’re true, while not bothering to look at the facts that show the opposite to be the case.

https://dcpcsb.org/student-enrollment

Re: Schools for children of military achieve results rarely seen in public education

#90

Post by red-iron-pine »

colechristensen wrote: post #22
HDThoreaun wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Education is mostly about your peers. It's obviously true for prestigious universities but it's just as true for elementary schools. Charter schools kicking out problematic students isn't some loophole, it's the main point, and it absolutely can improve the education for those that remain. My district has a quarter of high schoolers in charter schools. Almost all of them under the poverty line. It's not like they're…

The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care? By all accounts, there are many of these kids. A portion of them are special needs and they at least have a path for what people want to do with them, even if special education doesn't have all the resources they need... there's at least an answer to "what should we do?". But what should we do with the rest?

> The question is: what do you do about children with discipline problems whose parents don't care?

This is relevant point to the military thing. If you screw up at school, your military parents will be called -- and it may impact them directly. As in, Sgt. X, your kid keeps picking fights, and we're going to punish them, and you, for it.

Which means the parents care -- a lot.

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