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For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

washingtonpost.com

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Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#561

Post by tbrownaw »

scotty79 wrote: post #525
tbrownaw wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out figure four here: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma/public-school... Only five states get more than half of school funding from property taxes.

"On a national basis in 2019–20, revenues from local property taxes comprised 37 percent of total revenues for public schools." Schools often operate on a shoestring budget. 30% more or less often makes a difference between decently founded school and a disaster. I don't think you can deny that local property taxes funding shapes US education and its perception.

Maybe if state and federal funds were allocated without regard to how much local funding there is, but that's not actually how it's set up.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#563

Post by Justsignedup »

lotsoweiners wrote: post #311
Justsignedup wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as social welfare, I see it as more "ensure everyone, ESPECIALLY the elite, are bought into the system". Otherwise we get conversations like we do today where "do we defund the education system" is a real convo. If those same people would have no choice but to send their kids to a defunded education system... we'll see change. To add a bit more incentive, I'd say the children of any senator / congressm…

If everyone was forced to attend the same types of shitty public schools then it would just increase the market for private tutoring and supplemental education. The trend tends to be lowering the education standards to match the lower students instead of making standards more rigorous. This is why my kids attend charter schools.

I agree. This is why in Finland they made it law that nobody can not go to public education (a slight oversimplification). For exactly this reason. And they continue to diligently deny any attempts to game the system via strict court rulings. It even got to a point where kids wanted to swap schools due to them having less travel time, but the court said that this has the potential to lead to the wealthy using these exact arguments to send their kids to a local school which would be superior to other schools and thus defeat the entire point of the system. It is a lot of diligence but it is done for _exactly_ the reason you stated.

What I found interesting, is people look at the finnish education system and say "oh, if we did away with tests" or whatever... but the answer is, it has nothing to do with tests. It has everything to do with the thousands of small details that only get taken care of because the entire society is committed to making it work because _everyone_ is in it, so everyone has to fight for it, including the politicians who set policy and the elites.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#564

Post by Justsignedup »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #248
Justsignedup wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean the same can be said of anything. This is why the fight for for liberty never ends, because every day is a day some jackass can get into power and start claiming elections are rigged.

>"This is why the fight for for liberty never ends” I find it odd that you’re invoking Liberty when your proposals involve forcing everyone into the same system.

liberty does not mean "100% freedom of decisions in all matters". We already accept that you cannot drive without the same basic rules of the road. We already restrict that I cannot buy a tank and drive it up park avenue fully loaded because I am wealthy enough to do it. Freedom is not an absence of restrictions, freedom is the society deciding what restrictions we want and having healthy debates on the efficacy of those restrictions, vs what dictatorial governments decide with no chance of debate, scrutiny, or follow-through.

This one we would collectively have to accept as a necessary limitation because it would improve many things, and specify exactly how far that limitation should extend. That's the point.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#565

Post by treis »

robertlagrant wrote: post #556
treis wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this was more of a hypothetical to the "Silly-con robbing the government to get rich" bit of the GP.

Sorry, I don't understand. Can you put it more straightforwardly?

They said:

>And some states allow redirecting funds from state education money to pay for this new scam.

My point is that their admin fee is significantly less than what my local school district spends per pupil in admin. So redirecting money from public schools to them is not a "scam". It'd be a significant savings if it were theoretically possible.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#566

Post by gamblor956 »

rayiner wrote: post #559
watwut wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teachers joining protest against dress code in no way implies "focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. " The protest can mean a lot of things, including the dress code itself being against the norms of the community. One does not need to focus on questioning auth…

Do you not have students complaining about dress codes in your country? It was the typical individualist dreck: “kids have a right to dress like slobs/express their inner selves and schools shouldn’t try to stop them.” It was not a protest to reinforce existing community standards against an aberrant decision.

I went to an extremely conservative school in an extremely conservative school district. We also had protests over dress codes, and it wasn't about the "right to dress like slobs." It was entirely about reinforcing existing community standards (i.e., freedom of expression through clothing) against an aberrant decision (a district-mandated dress code imposed by a newly-elected slate of neo-conservatives).

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#567

Post by gnicholas »

smt88 wrote: post #357
labster wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not. In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies. Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company. B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an approp…

> Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.

We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!

The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.

Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#568

Post by mattpallissard »

> They have no oversight, no taxpayer accountability, no academic or curriculum standards,” said Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy group. “We don’t know what kids are learning.

That's the point. As a homeschool parent I have to say; It's. None. Of. Your. Business. It's not the main reason we homeschool our 5 kids, but it's important to us still.

We've been doing this for a decade now, across 3 states. Nearly all of the homeschool families I've met (high double digits) are high achievers who are going to be just fine on their own without strangers telling them what to do with their children.

Sidebar because Washington Post; We lived in Washington for a few years. WA has particularly onerous requirements around education in general when compared to the rest of the country. I'd go as far as to say that they're completely bonkers.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#569

Post by jen20 »

sarchertech wrote: post #494
jen20 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s no point in generalizing when discussing things like teacher salary. I bet there isn’t a single US public school district where teacher pay keeps pace with minimum wage when divided by the number of hours spent working.

That’s completely wrong. The state with the absolute lowest average teacher salary is Mississippi. Average salary is $48k. Assuming 12 hour days for 190 days a year, that’s about 3x minimum wage. There are many districts with much higher averages. Just one example. In a relatively low cost of living state, Fulton county GA—the county Atlanta is in—the starting salary is $56k, and $62k with a masters. It goes up every…

Why would you assume 190 days? However you are correct - minimum wage is WAY less than I assumed in the south (despite living there!)

Also: $62k/yr for a job requiring a masters degree is utterly criminal.

Re: For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

#570

Post by dang »

cogman10 wrote: post #76

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It quickly becomes repetitive and then turns nasty. We're trying for something else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274958.

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