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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Charter schools aren't needed for that though. Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most proble…

If schools don’t have competition there is no incentive to do this.

I’d argue that the majority of people have some desire to be good at their job, and take some pride in that. Competition is a terrible substitute for an effective culture, especially in environments dominated by externalities such as the entire lives of the children that are taught. I doubt many teachers spend much time checking other classrooms to see who is best, they have more important work to be getting on with

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

#262

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 understand why offering parents more choices in how their children are taught could be a bad thing. I am going to give my kid all the advantages I can, of course. But...personal optimization != societal optimization. Yes, I can put my kid in a better spot to succeed, but we aren't making progress as a society, things are getting very much worse actually (e.g. income inequality). > Yes, this does suck for th…

"Again, those kids left behind..."

It seems that you suppose that keeping those kids in "normal" school is better for them than moving them to some schools tailored to their needs.

There is nothing obvious about that. Removing the worst disruptors from standard classes may be a win-win. People are diverse and cannot be all served by a one-size-fits-all school type.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that all makes sense in a narrow way but I think you are sidestepping the actual challenge of education. As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. Schools that can be selective take advantage of that. If you are in a position to attend one of those restrictive schools it may improve your outcomes! However, the question of "how to do a good job edu…

> As the root comment pointed out - we already know that you improve outcomes by excluding low performers. That’s not quite the point. By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids , beyond what would be possible by mixing everyone together. So you can achieve a net societal improvement that way.

If those excluded kids are just moved from selective charter schools to non-selective public schools then, by the same argument, they'll be reducing the outcomes of the non-disruptive kids who don't have parents involved enough to take advantage of the system.

So unless these charter schools have a side business selling Soylent Green made from disruptive pupils and those with learning disabilities, they're not actually improving overall results.

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

#264
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> either don't understand or don't care that this is of net negative value Or genuinely think it's of net positive value. One disruptive kid can spoil the educations of 29 others pretty easily, and probably won't even gain anything from staying in school. It's a dead-weight loss. But we're too chickenshit to openly do anything about it, so the rich buy their way away from the bad kids one way or another, and the dece…

This happened to me, and was one reason why my parents pulled me out of school and I taught myself at home with a standardized curriculum.

It was only 1 kid in the class, but he was ruining the entire class almost every day, and the administration didn't want to risk the political fallout.

It was great to be able to learn as fast as I wanted with no distractions. Sometimes what has to be learned wasn't interesting and I didn't go any faster at it, but I did pull ahead in math by a couple years by 8th grade.

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

#265
How the results are measured? I imagine teachers acting as drill sergeants, perfect discipline in the class and children who forgot their homework doing push ups. The results of standardized tests such as PISA can be pretty high this way. But how many high achieving creatives, scientists, disruptors come out of these schools?

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now do the same for the underperforming kids in an underperforming school. > I'd suggest taking a look at what the military pays before you make the claim no poor. Less than public assistance? > As for single moms it turns out that divorce is a big problem At least your divorced military ex-wife has a better chance of actually collecting alimony and child support. > I'll give you that can be the case, if the MLM and…

Enlisted military families with 2 dependents usually qualify for public assistance programs. It's less of a problem stateside, because jobs open to military spouses are fairly easy to find. Families stationed overseas often don't have this option, though.

Do you know someone living like this currently? They should be getting allowances if their basic is below the poverty line.

If they've been in long enough to pop out 2 kids I hope to god someone's helping them on their way E4.

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

#268

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> 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.

“I don’t want my kids to go to school with people of a different race” makes you an asshole.

“I don’t want my kids to go to a school that will fail to educate them” makes you exactly the opposite.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you kind of just explained why public schools aren't actually competing, at least in poor areas. The issue is that many of the families in these areas do actually care about education, but are unable fix their schools because of others apathy. What should they do?

Organize. Campaign. Reach out to other parents. Name and shame. Apathy is hard to overcome, but most people already want good schools. Even people without kids don't want to be surrounded by uneducated people and don't want to deal with the problems they cause. Making time for local politics is a hard sell, but I've become increasingly convinced that it's our best chance to enact meaningful changes and improve our da…

This has already been happening and the result in many states is that the path of least resistance is to increase the decision making power of families.

Everyone voting with their feet is functionally equivalent to removing the disruptive kids from class, even though it might not seem like that if one has ideological blinders on.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Charter schools aren't needed for that though. Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most proble…

>Public schools are supposed to already be doing it. Either in the form of escalating detentions/suspensions followed by expulsion, or by moving the most problematic kids into emotional/behavioral disability classrooms/schools, or in the worst cases sending the children to hospitals and group homes. The problem is that public schools can't do those things, for various political and social reasons. So the charter scho…

Of course it's a political problem. There are people who have been scheming how to dismantle public education. The short term goal is to funnel tax payer money to private schooling. The longer term goal is to make sure the lower classes simply don't ever get an education.

So, yeah, it is a political problem.

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