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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

#281

Post by throwaway89347 »

chii wrote: post #253
throwaway89347 wrote: post #190

Public school teacher here. Public schools have been in a downward slide for decades. If you want to know what's wrong, just brace yourself and ask a teacher. Alas, many people want to believe it's the teachers' fault, and so rarely bother to ask the teachers. Or, failing that, people think it's just that teachers aren't paid enough and think more money will fix the problems (more money would be nice, but that's not…

So what is the real problem, pray tell?

Sorry. I typed out a reply, but it's like 5 pages. There's a lot wrong. Here's something extremely boiled down:

Too many administrators. Students having their phones in school. Out of control administrators who waste teachers' time. Students roaming halls. Phones. No consequences for skipping class, roaming halls, or cheating (administrators not enforcing discipline). Administrators desperate to get everyone to pass and graduate. Phones. Administrators pressuring teachers to pass students. No dress code. Endless accommodations for students. Endless meetings soaking up valuable teacher time. Administrators disallowing midterms and finals because that would cause too many students to fail their classes (now, many teachers are required to have projects and presentations, or similar as midterms and as finals). Valuable instruction time lost due to standardized testing. Rampant cheating. Zero consequences for students' behavior (extremely rare to see an out-of-school suspension, and expulsion is unheard of these days). Block scheduling (4 long periods per day) because students won't do homework (or will just cheat/copy/paste). Administrators constantly pushing group work, projects, posters (rather than real focused work).

There's more but I'm trying to stop typing now.

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

#282

Post by HDThoreaun »

dragonwriter wrote: post #274
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…

> Education is mostly about your peers. Nah, its mostly about your socio-economic status, home environment, and similar personal (not peer) factors.

Sure, but the school system has no control over any of that. As far as what it can control, peers are absolutely the most important.

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

#283

Post by vacuity »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #270
shiroiuma wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I can't speak on whether you're right, but there is genuinely a component where public schooling can't lump everyone together and expect things to work out. In high school, I knew someone who spread vicious rumors and made remarks about Nazi Germany and whatnot. Supposedly on the autism spectrum, although that's not an excuse either way. He was smart enough, but seemed more interested in aggravating and harassing people. There needs to be a separate schooling environment for people like that, one way or another.

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

#284

Post by nunez »

chii wrote: post #253
throwaway89347 wrote: post #190

Public school teacher here. Public schools have been in a downward slide for decades. If you want to know what's wrong, just brace yourself and ask a teacher. Alas, many people want to believe it's the teachers' fault, and so rarely bother to ask the teachers. Or, failing that, people think it's just that teachers aren't paid enough and think more money will fix the problems (more money would be nice, but that's not…

So what is the real problem, pray tell?

Budget two hours. Go on /r/teachers. Sort by top, all year. Read most of the posts and the comments.

Whats happened to public schools is a god damn travesty.

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

#285

Post by nunez »

throwaway89347 wrote: post #281
chii wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the real problem, pray tell?

Sorry. I typed out a reply, but it's like 5 pages. There's a lot wrong. Here's something extremely boiled down: Too many administrators. Students having their phones in school. Out of control administrators who waste teachers' time. Students roaming halls. Phones. No consequences for skipping class, roaming halls, or cheating (administrators not enforcing discipline). Administrators desperate to get everyone to pass…

And you get paid trash for the privilege of dealing with all of that. Trash being "slightly more than a Starbucks barista"

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

#286

Post by nosequel »

jjeaff wrote: post #208
nosequel wrote: post #55

This got touched on by a few replies, happy to see there are some others here with actual military experience chiming in. I grew up on military bases, and went to schools both on and off base for 18 years. All continental US bases typically have elementary-level (K-5) school, but you typically go to an off-base school for middle and high school. When you are overseas, this isn't the case, you would most likely go to…

Did you ever see any statistics to back up your perception that all the kids were extra well behaved for the rest of the year? The reason I ask is that we've all heard the whole "tough on crime" schtick and I feel like it has never really been proven out to be all that effective. especially on kids. plenty of kids receive penalties far more severe for the parents than having to move off base (like expulsion with no o…

I mean, there weren't "statistics". We had a school of 300 kids and I could nearly name every one of them. After shit went down, everyone calmed the hell down. I don't know how to prove it or anything, but when people really needed to fight or something, they took it WAAAY off base.

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

#287

Post by Dracophoenix »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #104
linuxftw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about US schools.... so? How can one sabotage a house of cards? Failure was inevitable.

I don’t believe that public schooling, an actually lindy institution worldwide , an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s (wonder what happened then hmm) that has produced world renowned schools in the US in particular, is more of a house of cards than the Potemkin village that is charter and private schools.

> an institution that was working quite well in the US up until about the 70s and 80s

Was it really? With corporal punishment, public humiliation, and outright bullying? I would never want to live or return to a time when in loco parentis permitted schools to be run like fiefdoms.

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

#288

Post by brightlancer »

aeturnum wrote: post #277
jvanderbot wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I disagree that a measure of success of an educational system is its breadth. If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education (or an alternative one!) Would that necessarily and absolutely be worse? What about 99/1 or 99.9 etc

> If serving 95% achieved vastly better outcomes and 5% received no education Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.

> Good luck convincing the families of the 5%! I'm not arguing this approach wouldn't improve outcomes - just that it's not considered an acceptable solution to "the problem of education." So it doesn't seem like a good faith contribution to the conversation the article is addressing because I believe it's already been rejected as an option.

Of course it's an option: this is why charter schools, private schools and home schools are increasingly popular!

Government education is the only meaningful way in which the majority of people are prohibited from meaningful choices for their kids because the government says "but what about the bottom 5%" -- so folks _opt out_ of government education entirely.

This is why "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists are trying to make opting out as difficult as possible -- even though "marginalized minorities" disproportionately support opting out.

But despite the "progressive" (i.e. leftist) politicians and activists, the alternatives are increasingly popular. It's slow, but there is improvement on the alternatives.

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

#289

Post by brightlancer »

aeturnum wrote: post #278
rayiner wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> By excluding low performers, you can improve the outcomes of the other kids Isn't this is what the root comment is saying? I did not summarize the entire thing but that was my understanding of its point. > you can achieve a net societal improvement that way. You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of soci…

> You can improve the outcomes of the non-low-performers, but it's hard to say it's a "net societal improvement" because the low performers are also part of society.

That depends on the improvement vs loss -- IME, it is a net improvement.

With 100 students, 5 are disruptive, verbally abusive, maybe physically violent. How much does that 5% bring down the other 95%? If we remove that 5% from the other 95%, how much does the 5% lose versus the 95% gain?

IME, the gains in the 95% are miles ahead of the losses in the 5%, which makes it's net improvement.

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

#290

Post by shiroiuma »

vacuity wrote: post #283
HumblyTossed wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't speak on whether you're right, but there is genuinely a component where public schooling can't lump everyone together and expect things to work out. In high school, I knew someone who spread vicious rumors and made remarks about Nazi Germany and whatnot. Supposedly on the autism spectrum, although that's not an excuse either way. He was smart enough, but seemed more interested in aggravating and harassing peo…

And speaking of Germany, over there they don't lump everyone together: somewhere around high school level, they split everyone into one of 3 tracks. Only one of those leads to college, the other two are for low-performers, and for people destined for the trades. Looking at the state of German industry, I'd say the system works out much better than the American system. However, a lot of leftists complain about it because it's somehow "unfair" for low-performing kids to not be grouped in with high performers where they can magically become better students by interacting with them...
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