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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

#171

Post by halfnormalform »

sokoloff wrote: post #66
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplistic arguments like this are one of the more annoying parts of the rhetoric of charter school advocates. It assumes that all charter schools are of high quality and that making education yet another thing that is economically stratified in the US is good. It’s ok to say that things that sound nice like choice in education can have knock on effects that are bad for society. Very few things in this world are pure…

It seems like a charter school that develops a reputation for low quality is a self-solving problem in a way that a public school which develops the same reputation is (currently) not. One goes out of business; the other goes along indefinitely, with perhaps the wealthiest parents nearby withdrawing their kids, but most families and children are forced to endure it or move away.

The feedback loop in education is several years long. Before a charter school develops a bad reputation, they just change their name, put up a banner declaring "Under New Management" and continue right along with better PR.

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

#172

Post by WillAdams »

The best school system I ever attended was a DOD-funded public school in rural Mississippi --- there were less than a dozen students from the local community, the balance were all from the Air Force Base.

Every teacher had at least a Master's Degree (pay was very good, and it was a very desirable school system to work at), and they had a system in place which firmly divided classes between academic and social --- for academic classes, one worked at one's ability level (up to four grades ahead until 8th grade when that was lifted), while social classes were at one's grade level. After 8th grade, one could begin taking college classes (some of the teachers were accredited as as faculty at a nearby college) --- if there wasn't a teacher available for a given class, then arrangements were made for a professor to come to the school, or for the student to travel to the college.

Many students would graduate high school and simultaneously receive a college degree.

The Mississippi State Supreme Court decided that the school was inherently unfair since it provided a notable benefit to students who studied hard and learned well without a corresponding benefit to those who would not do so.

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

#173

Post by pixl97 »

throwaway101223 wrote: post #89
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…

> 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 wi…

>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].

Now, what exactly do you think this is telling you?

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

#174

Post by etempleton »

hospadar wrote: post #87
etempleton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 susp…

I don’t disagree with you. All of what you said can be true and not change that 1 or 2 kids in a class can derail it for the other 20.

So pragmatically, with limited resources, how should those resources be spent? On the 20 kids with a moderate to high chance of succeeding or on the 2 kids with a very low chance?

From a societal ROI perspective it is pretty obvious.

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

#175

Post by linuxftw »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #155
linuxftw wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to provide evidence that public schools were working well in the 70s and 80s. Graduation rates today are higher than those decades. High school was optional for many parts of the country. The reason for the outcry now, is that we measure everything, and even the wealthier areas of the country are unable to perform to any reasonable standard.

Note: not working well in the 70s and 80s, working will up until the 70s and 80s. But gladly, this is a great resource: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf . Combine with this: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1804780 . At the exact point in our history that we should've accelerated spending in public resources we did an about face in the opposite direction towards privatization and the growth of the…

Graduation rates and attendance were even lower before the 70's, so I'm not sure what fantasy world you might be referring to. Are you referring to segregated schools? That probably wasn't an ideal system.

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

#176

Post by femiagbabiaka »

linuxftw wrote: post #175
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: not working well in the 70s and 80s, working will up until the 70s and 80s. But gladly, this is a great resource: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf . Combine with this: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1804780 . At the exact point in our history that we should've accelerated spending in public resources we did an about face in the opposite direction towards privatization and the growth of the…

Graduation rates and attendance were even lower before the 70's, so I'm not sure what fantasy world you might be referring to. Are you referring to segregated schools? That probably wasn't an ideal system.

Oh. I assumed we were sharing information, not exchanging insults. I'm not sure what segregation has to do with anything, the data doesn't align, and many of the states focused on are in the north anyways. If you can't see the gigantic drop in test scores, lower velocity on all fronts save spending, and corresponding drop in productivity then that's ok.

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

#177

Post by greenhexagon »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #161
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…

It is both a loophole and the main point. It's the main point for people who want their children to succeed at the expense of the rest of society and it's a loophole when they try to sell that concept to the rest of society as "we can teach better for cheaper so give us your tax money and let us replace universal public education" rather than "we have thrown some of your children on the scrapheap for you to expensive…

Please also consider: removing the one or two severely disruptive students from a classroom results in drastically better education for the 20+ students who remain, which is likely a benefit to society at large.

Based on my own education, a public school where every single day the same 1 or 2 students disrupted the lesson, assaulted nearby students and forced the teachers to waste hours on maintaining order rather than teaching, the result wasn't that the median student pulled the troublemaker up, it was that the troublemaker caused the entire classroom to not learn anything.

Society would have been far better off to have the couple students unable to thrive in a conventional classroom go to an alternative school and have all the other students get a decent education.

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

#178

Post by canucker2016 »

joshhart wrote: post #7

The article suggests several causes: 1. Bias in population - these students all have families where at least one parent has a stable job, which isn't true elsewhere. There could also be other factors, for instance maybe people who enter the military are more motivated on average and that genetically or through parenting is passed on to their kids. 2. Better funding 3. Frequent feedback to teachers and more methodical…

The parental bias is two-pronged - officers, many are college-educated, esp. from the various armed forces academies - West Point, Annapolis, et al., and those recruited into the armed forces have to overcome various hurdles, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/every-branch-us-milita...:

"The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.

An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007. "

So out of the possible Americans aged 17-24, less than 2.3% would serve in the military. The partner/spouse may not have to pass those hurdles, but having at least one parent with those attributes and employed would help the family wellbeing.

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

#180

Post by sobkas »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #115
econonut wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your implication that conservative politicians are more likely to be sabotaging schools than democratic politicians is hilarious. I'm quite certain both sides are equally adept at throwing good money after bad so long as the present policy they pursue is fashionable and focus group tested. They're incompetent, as you say, or, perhaps, they just aren't willing to risk their own political future because the changes tha…

My reading of "purposefully sabotaged" is that whoever was in charge of the schools decided to make them worse for political reasons, like not believing in public education. I'm not aware of any dems doing this. I certainly agree that they have accidentally sabotaged schools through incompetence or corruption, but that's a much harder problem to fix than "just don't vote for people that don't believe in public educat…

It's similar problem to drugs. We have populist solutions that don't work and solutions that work but will make you unelectable. Guess what solutions will get implemented? Also it doesn't matter how much money is spent per child if almost all of it is spent on turning school into day prisons for children. Students from poor families need more resources to be able to achieve same as children who have richer families. Family support goes a long way. This includes material support and cultural one. Parents often don't know how or have resources to help their children. Easiest solution would be for schools/government to help their parents so their children could rely on their family for support. Helping whole family is not only good for children but also to whole community. It was shown that hungry students have lower achievements than feed ones but we still pretend like only thing that matters is personal learning ethics, so we don't have to feed them.

Keep in mind that the North also had it's share of segregation and discrimination against poor(and by proxy Irish, Poles etc) and people of colour. It includes schools.

Also property tax as way of funding schools is awful.

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