Earlier quoted context omitted.
Home schooling doesn't have any quality control. That's only great if the parent makes it great. And it is often the case that parents don't make it great. A lot of parents are lazy and happy to do the minimum or less - they only home school, or pretend to, enough to keep the state off their back, and may prefer that kids do work for them. In addition, there is a strong tendency for home-schooling parents to be very…
> Home schooling doesn't have any quality control. Neither do public schools.
Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
51–60 of 146 posts
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#52Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United St…
"I think we really need to understand the problem: public schools are locally funded and operated and small locales can use real estate to become exclusive." Implicitly, you are saying that the real problem is that public schools do not receive enough funding. Is that correct? If the problem is that public schools are not getting enough money, how much money should they get? How much should be spent per pupil in orde…
Good teachers want to teach students that want to learn, and they don't want to be bogged down by the failures of less popular schools (we are holding off on income for a bit here). They end up moving where schools are doing a better job, mainly because the culture of the region has parents and children who value their education. They get paid more, because the school wants to retain these better teachers, who do good jobs, rather than the assembly line college graduates who ended up in education as the "default" and just want the job security.
So now money can factor in, and these better teachers with proper facilities are being paid more, and have better maintained institutions to keep them hired, and since the region already has a pro-education culture in advance, it has wealthy people who pay higher property taxes to keep the school all the more well off.
And just equalizing the money doesn't kill off one half of the feedback loop - it just renders one neutral. Good teachers would still go where parents culturally want their children to learn and promote their educations rather than places where the parents, and by extension children, predominately don't like the education system and are hostile to it.
Fundamentally, the solution is that every child needs to simultaneously want to learn, more importantly learn something they can be passionate about and pursue as a career (besides basic human interaction like arithmetic, grammar, essential history, and things not taught in school like how to calculate taxes, essential law code, etc) while at the same time they are paired with educators who give them the one on one engagement to keep them on track, who value their role as the builders of a future generation more than their guaranteed paychecks, and getting those two to pervasively penetrate culture is a much bigger problem than moving money around.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#53I don't know why Linus says that Americans blindly accept the crappiness. Perhaps they accept it because its systemic nature makes a hard thing to fix, but the acceptance isn't blind. Most smart people I know in this country seem to have had some clash with the school system in some form or another. Linus talks mostly about funding, but there's also the huge problem that schools don't seem to be teaching math and sci…
Seriously we don't pay enough taxes to cover these basic services?
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#54Linus is correct to disagree with the Oregon bill, and it's too bad that he didn't point to an existing example in another state with some cultural similarities to Oregon. Finding out what learning environment, inside or outside school, is optimal for each learner is definitely a worthy goal, especially if means are then provided to obtain that environment. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on…
I now live in Chicago, which is the third largest school district in the United States. It's completely broken.
* The schools are massively segregated -- both by income and by race. The wealthy leadership of the city clearly decided a long time ago to give up on the public school system and send their children to private school. Even in middle class neighborhoods like Hyde Park, the divide is clear: if you're poor or black, you go to the local public school. If you can afford it, you don't.
* The school district is trying to close down 50 odd elementary schools, almost all of them in the ghettos. Why? Because population loss has eroded the tax income from those areas to the point where they can barely operate anymore.
* The entire teachers union went on strike for a few days earlier this year to protest salary and benefit cuts, increased testing, and the city's neglect for the school system. They didn't really win -- the salary cuts were mostly averted, but the tests keep rolling in.
* For every 100 students who enters CPS as a freshman in high school, only 6 ever get a bachelors degree.
The schools back home in Minnesota aren't perfect or even particularly good. They're mediocre. They're ok. But they're so much better than in Chicago (and many other parts of the country) that I will seriously consider moving back to Minneapolis when I start having kids.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#55You can't really compare the school systems of a homogenous country with low income inequality to one where 30% of the population is from either a historically oppressed racial minority group or relatively recent immigrants. It's especially misleading to look at school systems in urban areas, because that's where the U.S. puts most of the poor people.
That is not to say we don't have a problem here in the U.S. But the problem isn't with the education system, it's with how we've dealt with the disadvantaged in our society.
A great example of this is Chicago. Finland spends about $10,000 per year per student. Chicago spends about $20,000 per student. Chicago teachers are paid over $70k/year on average, almost double the $37k/year Finnish teachers are paid. Why does Chicago do so poorly? It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it has nothing to do with money or school quality, but the fact that 86% of Chicago's students come from low-income families, and 87% are disadvantaged ethnic minorities.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#56Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United St…
You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. You left yourself a wiggle word there, but it doesn't make the sentiment correct. Just as a programmer I've worked with and for folks who have graduated from such juggernauts as Northwestern…
Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. You left yourself a wiggle word there, but it doesn't make the sentiment correct. Just as a programmer I've worked with and for folks who have graduated from such juggernauts as Northwestern…
Still, lets not confuse matters here. People from lower tier schools make it, and make it big, all the time. Yes, you can find plenty of counter-examples, but the average income of the college graduate and the highschool dropout are miles apart.
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only responding to a small part of your argument: For every univ. that is good, there is a Univ. of Phoenix. But, for every univ. that is good you also have Bronx High school of NY... which produced 8 Nobel prize laureates, you have Stuyvesant, which produced 5 Nobel prize laureates. America is much a place of extremes -- you'll often find the best and worst from nearly every category.
This is practically the only description of America that you need, and it's only become more apparent to me now that I've left. America is obsessed with extremes. You could add health care to schools as an example. America is the last place in the world I'd want to be if I broke my arm (especially if I happened to be uninsured at the time), but probably the first place I'd go if I was diagnosed with some obscure canc…
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#59Linus is correct to disagree with the Oregon bill, and it's too bad that he didn't point to an existing example in another state with some cultural similarities to Oregon. Finding out what learning environment, inside or outside school, is optimal for each learner is definitely a worthy goal, especially if means are then provided to obtain that environment. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on…
Re: Linus on Oregon HB 2748 and US education in general
#60The alternative many will be forced to take will be Homeschooling + Online Courses, which is great! À la carte education sounds much more useful than a buffet of stuff selected by someone else for you.
Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents? Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?