After moving my kids out of a bad elementary school and into a fantastic district with a highly ranked school, the differences are obvious. The good school has smarter kids with better parents. The bad school had dull kids with bad parents. The kids at the new school do their homework, read, play outside. The kids at the old school skipped homework, played call of duty, and could hardly read. The new school has fun e…
In your discussion of "bad kids", it seems like there's a subtext you're not saying out loud.
I have not read that subtext, maybe is your own unconscious bias...
> [Edit: Hunh. Imagine that. I ask people to demonstrate their unwillingness to participate in meaningful dialog by down-voting this post and they do exactly that. Si Tacuisses, Philosophus Mansisses.] I was considering commenting when I originally downvoted but thought it would detract from the core conversation. But now that you’ve added this bit I’ll just say: a number of people (including myself) will auto-downvo…
I'm sure the white dude from Middletown with a law degree from Yale is personally familiar with systemic social depredation.
JD Vance famously grew up in poverty and chaos caused by his mother's chronic drug addiction and his father's having abandoned him when he was a toddler.
Vance grew up with middle class access to stuff like stable housing, food in the fridge, his grandparents had stock and pension plans, he peppers his book with spicy poverty stuff like finding a weed plant or second hand stories of blood fueds to vet hillbilly cred. There are many middle class families that go through similar shit, but the common black/latino poverty experience often involves surviving narco gang cultures, ambient verbal and physical harassment among friends and family where calling the cops isn't an option, or coercive sex or rape at an early age. Urban poverty is an entirely different beast where you witness 12 year girls olds being given MDMA and entering the sex trade, later having to go to witch doctors or cauldron chemists for improvised poison abortions because Vance's party demedicalized the practice in your state.
My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”. Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library. In reali…
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but is there still much purpose in a modern high school libraries except as a work/study space? Elementary school libraries are important because kids can check out books at their reading level and you don't need a huge variety. But in high school, when I wanted a book for research or recreational reading, 99% of the time my high school library wouldn't have it anyways. You had…
I got my first reading itch from my school library. For most of my childhood the fiction I read (and I read a LOT) was from my school library.
My son is taking a woodworking class in high school. First week, he came home and I asked him what he was doing in his woodworking class… “Disassembling the library bookcases”. “Why???” “Because they’re getting rid of the library”. Apparently the school board decided to save money by cutting the librarian, and then decided to just move the books out of the school library and into the “nearby” public library. In reali…
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I challenge you to take a batch of any random 10 8th grade students and have them do any serious work. Would love to see how suitable for work and job markets they are.
> Every now and again there is an aberration where teachers actually teach something in a public school, but in the US, why take the chance? If you can afford it, send your kids to a private school. Ignoring the existence of well-off suburban public schools.
Yes. I went to a very nice suburban public school. As did my offspring. But it seems somehow... thermodynamic... in order to maintain the quality of our suburban public schools, we have to take more and more resources away from other schools, in less well-off neighborhoods.
I don't have data on this, but it certainly SEEMS to be that way.
Regardless of the arguments, it's encouraging to see people interested enough in public education to take the time to comment (even if it's a comment I don't agree with.)
In your discussion of "bad kids", it seems like there's a subtext you're not saying out loud.
I have not read that subtext, maybe is your own unconscious bias...
The commenter suggested the old school was filled with bad kids and bad parents, and by definition, this would include the commenter and their kids. Unless they are suggesting they weren't the bad ones, and were somehow unfairly placed with the riff raff. If that's the case, some analysis of why that is seems in order.
The racial achievement gap is probably one of the most significant problems educators in the US think about. I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving it (not causing the problem, but making solutions difficult or ineffective) is that low-performing urban school districts tend to correlate strongly with strong teachers' unions and big, mismanaged school administrations where things are too bureaucratic and in…
Why do you assume racial achievement gaps indicate problems with schools? For example, Asian students perform much better than white students. We don’t say that indicates a problem with how schools educate white kids. Instead, most people see it as a predictable consequence of asian immigrants being filtered for higher education. By that same token, why would we treat Hispanic students having lower scores as indicati…
Schools are the only tool we have at hand to reliably solve it.
In the US there are a few obvious things, but everyone acts as if we are powerless to solve them: 1. Cell phones in classrooms. I don’t know how or why they were ever allowed. They should have to be in a backpack or in a locker and off during class. 2. Not removing students with bad behavior from classrooms and schools. The current thinking on how to handle a student who is seriously misbehaving and potentially viole…
1. Good luck. Have you ever tried to take an iPad kid's iPad? Be ready for the fight of your fucking life. 2 and 5 are handily down to No Child Left Behind which is frankly some of the worst legislation ever devised for education. 3 and 4: And these factors are only getting worse as worse and worse kids enter the school systems. Nobody wants to deal with them, including their parents. Bonus: It's not hard, but we won…
Any person who has such an "iPad kid" has completely failed as a parent. That they can't have everything their way is literally the first moral value children are taught in functioning societies; if this basic need is not being met then we are truly living in a dystopia.