Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

sbnation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 474 posts

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#81

Post by gnat »

masklinn wrote: post #68
roland35 wrote: post #50

I am excited about this approach and I think LeBron's organization has put a lot of though and work with experts on this project. - This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is makin…

> Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused. The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.

And research consistently shows that teenagers perform better if you start school later in the day than 7am. E.g., http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192636502086633... "shifted the school start timefrom 7:15 a. m. to 8:40 a. m. This article examines that change, finding significant benefits such as improved attendance and enrollment rates, less sleeping in class, and less student-reported depression."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1540200070126380... "Students at the late-starting school reported waking up over 1 hr later on school mornings and obtaining 50 min more sleep each night, less sleepiness, and fewer tardies than students at the early school."

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.3.3.62 "Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement, which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation."

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#82

Post by YinglingLight »

toyg wrote: post #75
masklinn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused. The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.

You absolutely cannot compare Northern Europe with inner-city black America. Different worlds, different values, different histories, different attitudes, different challenges. No model fits all, especially in education, but these two realities are so dramatically different that they don’t really belong in the same sentence.

100%.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#83

Post by beat »

rory096 wrote: post #54
mliker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it's a magnet of underprivileged and at risk students. Not your typical magnet. Props to LeBron for starting the school.

No doubt! I definitely don't mean to denigrate the project at all, it's an incredibly philanthropic move by LeBron and he deserves every ounce of the praise he's been getting. I just see a lot of people using the "public school" line as a cudgel to bash charter schools, but charter schools are exactly the mechanism to accomplish something like this for people who aren't revered/rich enough to exercise the kind of inf…

Charter schools are wonderful, if the state's laws are well written. I'm in Minnesota, and my kids went to charters for seven years, (six at a project-oriented school that targeted students with learning or social problems in mainstream schools). But it works here because the system is completely fair - any student can attend any school, and there are no good mechanisms for private charters, or for charters that exclude students by type. Many of the charters are actually sponsored by school districts - for example, Minneapolis has dedicated bilingual charters for the large Somali and Spanish-speaking populations.

Then I see the consequences of bad law in other states, and I just cringe.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#84

Post by koolba »

pjmorris wrote: post #58
koolba wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not in the interests of the teacher's union to fracture the public school system. The larger, more faceless and immeasurable it gets, the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them. Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and…

> the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes. Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers a…

> The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes.

Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):

> The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike.

> Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff.

> None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.”

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickhess/2018/06/25/5-less....

The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#85

Post by nemo44x »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #55

It's great to see superstars like LeBron doing something like this. Say what you want about him as a player but you cant knock him as a philanthropist.

I'm not a fan boy or anything but he's a rather remarkable person. To take advantage of the biological attributes he was given and work insanely hard to maximize them from a young age. All while not being distracted by all the other things that could lead to squandering his natural talents. And then not relying just on those but enhancing them through dedication and discipline.

Then you throw in all the pressure he had as a youth to be the next big thing and then going to the NBA and succeeding immediately in terms of personal ability.

Yes, he had that PR blunder when he left Cleveland but he had good reason to - he just took bad advice and went about it wrong. But he proved his point and then came back home and helped win a championship for his hometown team.

All this while remaining super charismatic, not falling into bad habits or getting involved in scandals. Being a good father and marrying his high school sweetheart whom he has 3 children with.

Doing things for the community that aren't vapid or short term PR grabs. But really trying to make a difference.

All the while coming from a very disadvantaged place economically and without his father around.

He's by all accounts a savvy and smart businessman and hasn't blown it like so many people with rags to riches stories. He has kept his good friends around and integrated them into his businesses in ways that make sense. He appears to show true loyalty to those that were with him before he became what he is today.

He's well spoken and thoughtful on top of it all.

I don't follow his sport much but he is a person who appears to just be exceptional in many ways. He just seems so genuine and without the veneer that other stars really suffer from. Granted he has a massive PR team and marketing team but it would have been so easy to have a slip-up. It would have been easy to make bad business decisions and it would have been easy to find new "friends" and women and all the other things that are short term. But he has a goal larger than being an NBA star and he's stuck with it.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#86

Post by [deleted] »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #56
untog wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American public schools are run by local government only for people the local government wants to admit Eh? Everyone is admitted to public schools in America. You often don't get the choose the specific school, but everyone has the right to a place in a school.

Not being able to choose the specific school is a huge deal though. In the same school system, some of the schools are out-of-this-world, while others are zoos. If I had the choice between sending my kids to some of the schools I went to growing up, or letting them stay home and watch cartoons all day, I'd choose the latter. At least they're not going to get shivved watching Adventure Time.

[deleted]

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#87

Post by HarryHirsch »

BurningFrog wrote: post #72
Nokinside wrote: post #39

Elizabeth Warren pointed out that the US housing crisis was partly caused by inflated house prices in good public school districts. Middle income families were paying the education of their children in high property price. Maybe LeBron should invest into the property around the school to reap some of the benefits and use them to finance the school. Holistic property development.

Warren is not a great thinker on Economics issues. Good or bad school districts only change the relative prices. It doesn't alter the total amount of housing per population. In other words, anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.

You'd think that the good school districts are areas with new construction, because whoever can afford it will want to move away from the plebs. So you have big, new, expensive housing. On the other hand you'll predict unoccupied residences on the undesirable areas.

This is true in my neck of the woods.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#89

Post by wiremine »

roland35 wrote: post #50

I am excited about this approach and I think LeBron's organization has put a lot of though and work with experts on this project. - This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is makin…

> a longer school year helps students stay focused

My kids (4th and 7th) attend a school with a year-round schedule, and we (kids and parents) love it:

* They are less stressed because there is more breaks throughout the year. Teachers seem less stressed, too, because they don't have to pack so much in.

* They retain more in the summer.

* Outside of academics: it's really nice to have the option to take longer vacations outside of spring break and summer break.

I'd love to see more schools move to it... 3 months off in summer seems very antiquated in hindsight.

Re: How LeBron James' new public school is the first of its kind

#90

Post by everdev »

BurningFrog wrote: post #72
Nokinside wrote: post #39

Elizabeth Warren pointed out that the US housing crisis was partly caused by inflated house prices in good public school districts. Middle income families were paying the education of their children in high property price. Maybe LeBron should invest into the property around the school to reap some of the benefits and use them to finance the school. Holistic property development.

Warren is not a great thinker on Economics issues. Good or bad school districts only change the relative prices. It doesn't alter the total amount of housing per population. In other words, anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.

Right, but if you have a county-wide increase in property value of 10%. Good school districts might see a 20% increase while bad school districts see no appreciation.

Also, there's first time homebuyers and deaths or people leaving the country/country to consider. People enter and exit the market all the time, it's not a perfect 1:1 swap all the time.

I think it's a valid point that county/state/national economic growth is rarely uniform.

Post reply on HN