I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell.
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.
These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.
Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
The purpose for "blame" or "fault" is to know who to punish to best improve society. The "what if" and "what is" scenarios stem from treating "blame" as a mysterious entity that leads to punishment, and then pathological (pathos) appeals that no one is really to blame. It seems rather tautological that society should adopt rules for blame that improves society, not rules that make people feel good inside.
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
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I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
What do you mean by "fault"? My concept of "fault" is whoever I'm going to punish to make society better. (More precisely, assume everyone has some policy `p_i` for actions they take. If a certain action `a` is bad for society, they get punished proportionally according to `KL(a, p_i)`, i.e. they are that much at fault.)
If their home circumstances are forcing them to act this way, then too bad for them! That is part of them and they should be blamed until you can fix the root cause.
Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic, any policy built on that expectation will be ineffective at best and likely harmful, and thus anyone advocating for it is at best asking us to waste resources and at worst asking us to harm kids.
You've got over 20 posts in this thread, many of them putting the blame on children with no evidence that this would be helpful (probably because it wouldn't be). You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
I can tell you're passionate about, but frustrated by this issue. My advice is to take a breath and if you're really interested, do some reading and get involved. There are successful education systems out there (everyone references Finland); things aren't hopeless.
> You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
Do you really believe this? I flagged your comment, because I'm worried that you are trying to convince people by building an ethos (and tearing down others' ethos) instead of appealing to logic. Your writing is very good, but there isn't much substance to it. For example, you say
> Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic
but don't substantiate why it is unrealistic. I've found that when people disagree (in America) there are usually layers of rhetoric that have been built around the issue, so much so that it can be hard to dig down to the crux of the issue and actually resolve the disagreement. This is why I'm worried about how you're writing: it seems to be adding layers instead of removing them. (EDIT: Note, I don't think you are doing this intentionally.)
Now, I do think I have been adding to the discussion. For example:
- I proposed we raise salaries by 10x and fire everyone to balance the budget.
- I gave an anecdote showing that even top-tier public schools have anti-learning cultures.
- I've pointed out that the "for whom" is important when discussing what is good or bad.
I wanna start off by saying you're clearly a smart person and I'm not trying to run you out or anything. I'm--both deliberately and subconsciously--saltier post Trump v2 and I'm trying to work through it. A big part of me wants to litigate everything all the time, but I'm gonna avoid that here because I believe in the HN community and that wouldn't build and strengthen that community (imagine the breathing exercises it took to attain this level of clarity haha).
Instead I want to discuss your basic point: we should expel problem kids because it improves outcomes for non-problem kids. I don't want to come off as condescending but I DDG'd for "does expelling students improve outcomes" and literally nobody thinks that. Here's some stuff to read:
"evidence shows these tactics aren’t effective in changing a student’s conduct, and carry major long-term risks for their welfare. Students most affected tend to be those with higher and more complex needs, such as those with disabilities and mental health issues."
"The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate." (emphasis mine)
"Suspensions do not reduce classroom disruptions, and often encourage them."
"Suspensions do not improve outcomes for students, whether suspended or not."
"Suspensions do not prevent, and may increase, the risk of school violence."
"Restorative justice focuses on reconciliation with victims, learning from misconduct, and repairing harm caused by student misconduct. Victim-offender mediation is a common restorative justice program. For one example, in Denver Public Schools, a successful school-based restorative justice program decreased expulsions by 82%, suspensions by 39%, and referrals to law enforcement by 15%."
"Black students in North Carolina are more than four times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students. Research has found no evidence that the over-representation of Black students in school suspension rates is due to higher rates of misbehavior."
"In total, Washington students lost over 169,689 days of class time during 2015. When students are suspended or expelled, they cannot participate in class, are less likely to complete schoolwork, and are more likely to skip school."
TL;DR: suspending and expelling doesn't do what you think it does; instead it causes a lot of harm; other approaches are better.
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Alright, now for some soapboxing. Again, you're a smart person, so I earnestly want to know did you jump in this thread to push your wildly incorrect take before Googling, or have you drank some kind of anti-DoE anti-public-education anti-teacher kool-aid? I'm so deeply weary of arrogant STEM people assuming there are no smart people anywhere else--I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when it comes to what improves and enriches a discussion. Giving people information they may not have, getting new information and making connections that aren't yet there, giving people grace. The moment we give in and just start trying to win the argument we've lost the whole thing--we have to enrich our mental model of the world together. Or more pointedly, I'm relying on you to help me enrich my mental model of the world, so I need you to call me out when I'm blathering on tilt (could maybe be doing that here) or I've got it wrong, or you know something I don't. If you're gonna be effective at that, you have to do the reading, you have to be self aware, and you have to have compassion. It is work, but people doing that work is how HN stays valuable.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work. We know some schools are better than others. We know students in "gifted" classes do better than others, and if your references are correct even a regular student in a "gifted" class would soak up the positive climate and turn out better than in a regular class. This seems to imply that expelling enough students should make the school better. For an extreme example, you could have everyone take a test, expel the lowest 50% of marks to a lower-tier school, and the remaining students would have better marks. This comparison is a little unfair, because expulsion is usually reserved for disruptive behaviour, not poor marks, but you could similarly have every teacher compile a list of misbehaving students. When I hear that expulsion wouldn't fix the problem, it must be because they are not expelling enough people!
I'm also a little leery of drawing the same conclusions as the news articles you linked. It seems likely that suspension/expulsion does always work, there's just a causation between lots of students misbehaving in a school and more students being expelled in the school. For example, the second news article says
> The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate.
which has a few paragraphs on peer spillover effects from out-of-school suspension vs. in-school suspension. They do find a 1-2% decrease in the peers achieving ELA/math credit with out-of-school suspension (20-30% for the suspended), but there are also 20,000 incidents of out-of-school suspension with a median length ~two weeks [Table A.4]. Their data comes from the NYCDOE which has just under a million students, which means their peers also being suspended could account for half of the decrease! Then there's the correlation between negative school climate, more grievous offences, and out-of-school suspension (re: Table A.4), and it seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox.
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Alright, time for the spicier part of this comment.
> I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
I don't think the so-called educators are being smart. I think the average wokist is smarter than the average MAGAt (by a lot), but most systems fall into the Goodhart trap. People who optimise for looking good rather than being good often bubble to the top. This is why I think many woke arguments lean heavily on emotional appeals. The callous or ignorant MAGAts that only care about the gas price ironically end up with a more meritocratic system, because results matter.
I didn't partcularly like Graham's essay either, but I do sympathise with the anti-woke sentiment almost entirely because I believe this Goodharting has devastated the education system. For example, a common refrain I found in the comment section and your linked articles was,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
The MAGAt mentality is "I don't care, show me the results". They find current schools lacking, but don't particularly care about why they're lacking which is where school choice/vouchers come in. You don't need to fix things if you can just let the market find something better. This is a rather callous/ignorant take, and you can do much better by caring to find where the current system went wrong. I suspect it's because wokists forgot why we assign moral blame.
I think the purpose of "blame" in society is to figure out who to punish/rehabilitate to make society better. Note that even if there is a confounding factor it does not excuse the blame. I believe I've already mentioned this to you: you assign moral blame based on KL(bad action, person's policy). Why? If someone puts a gun to your head, and tells you to rob a store, you are unlikely to repeat the action. Your policy is really only, "rob stores when I have a gun to my head". On the other hand, if you were abused as a child and turned out a kleptomaniac, you are extremely likely to repeat the offence.
Now, rehabilitation has to actually work. If someone is starving, it doesn't matter how many beatings you give them, they will still steal food. Positive rehabilitation is often better for society, because you don't need to spend a bunch of money on the justice system, and the rehabilitated criminal can hold a job and pay taxes. Punitive rehabilitation works by decreasing the cost of future crimes from similarly-minded people. Note that I'm being really careful to talk about what is good for society, not the criminal. After all, every individual except the criminal (and friends/family) gains more by asking for the good of society, not the individual.
This ties into wokism and education as so: the wokist gives the emotional appeal,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
and the proper response is,
> good for whom?
As I mentioned at the start of this comment, it is good for the top 50% of students to expel the bottom 50% to an alternative school. Should we? In reality, we have to work under money and (as you pointed out) pitchfork & torch constraints. My issue with emotional appeals is they bring out the pitchforks, for potentially no good reason.
For example, I went to middle school in a rather conservative city, but even there the gifted program was eliminated in the name of equity. High school graduation standards have dropped, again in the name of equity. And California briefly proposed not allowing 8th graders to take algebra (for equity's sake) until they received massive backlash.
I care much more about what is actually good for society than what looks good. I really don't see how it's good to be holding back our brightest students to the bottom quintile's pace, or allow disruptions from known troublemakers.
At this point I'm rather tired; I might continue writing this tomorrow, but I probably won't. I'll just end with what I wish the school system looked like:
1. A national placement exam for each grade (including Kindergarteners). Students get placed into schools and classrooms entirely from their rankings (within the local system). The top scorers are offered room and board at nationally-run schools.
2. Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries. I read elsewhere in this thread of a city with three tiers of schools: one for regular students, one for first-time expulsions, and a last for the chronically expelled. This is what I'm imagining.
3. The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum. Quite frankly, Common Core is a failure; you see a decline in AMC 10/12 scores and participants about eight years after it was introduced, i.e. just enough time for the students who learned from Common Core to be taking the exams.
4. Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach. At $15k/yr per student (what the US currently spends), and 30 students to a class, this should be just doable.
> Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
Thank you (also for indulging)! As an also-arrogant STEM person myself we can muddle through together haha.
> So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work.
I think a number of dynamics are at play here:
- Schools don't usually reach for suspension/expulsion that quickly because they're weighing the impact of the problem kid's behavior on others vs. the impact of a suspension/expulsion on the kid, so their disruptive lingers.
- Some schools have zero tolerance policies that suspend/expel very quickly, but it turns out that creates a super weird climate (students defending themselves are also suspended/expelled, school staff feel pretty bad suspending/expelling all the time, you can't build relationships with problem kids which is deeply dehumanizing on both sides, etc.)
- Problem kids have a weird habit of just coming right back. A lot of us are envisioning a relatively rich school district with multiple nets to cordon off problem kids, bost districts have the one school, maybe if they're lucky there's an "alternative school" in the parking lot, which is a trailer that should only ever have 5 people in it, but it has 15. Maybe some people are advocating for some kind of super harsh zero-tolerance-expelled-forever pipeline, but let me introduce those advocates to the School-to-Prison Pipeline [0].
- Problem kids are still in your neighborhood, your kid is pretty likely to still see them outside of school, and that leads to more weird social dynamics.
But moreover, let's say that zero-tolerance-expel-immediately leads to better outcomes for kids and we have some way of totally segregating problem kids both in school and broader society. Those kids are still a problem for society that we'll have to deal with at some point. Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox
Nah, definitely not. A commonly cited paper [1] has a pretty good table breaking down the effects of various classroom properties on outcomes. Reading it, you'll immediately get a great look at why private/charter school outcomes are so much better: they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better outcomes, thus exacerbating the School-to-Prison Pipeline issue by putting more pressure on public schools. Anyway, there's so much on this topic you're gonna have to switch your argument to explaining a conspiracy in educational research:
Blame essentially never works, and it's because people are the products of systems. You talk about Goodhart's Law; another dynamic is where we do things that feel good or confirm our understanding of the world despite poor outcomes. Harsh disciplinary policies are the poster child for this. I'm gonna assume here you're pretty naive to the criminal justice space (this is because anyone who knows anything about criminal justice understands blame essentially never works), so I strongly encourage you to interrogate your priors here and read up on deterrence, punishment, and so on.
> National placement test for each grade
This would really only measure socioeconomic status, like most (all?) standardized tests. You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries.
Not only are there completely valid reasons for students becoming disruptive (parental issues, injuries, mental health issues, etc), the expense of this is out of this world. Even in the cheapest state (Arkansas) spending-per-inmate is $23k/yr--the median is something like $60k. Your options here are dramatically increase taxes or create a truly horrific human rights disaster.
> The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum.
This doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
> Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach [30 student classes].
30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want. You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you. Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people? That $15k/yr number you keep citing isn't all salary; we spend around $236b on ~4m teacher salaries, which yields ~600k teachers (at $400k/yr salary), so you still need to find $680b (which is more than the budget of Medicaid) for the remaining 1.7 million teachers. You also have to somehow survive the political fallout of firing hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have families and various health issues.
> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
| Assume each student randomly needs extra help some x% of the time. Then, the expected length until no needs help is (1-x%)^-n. Just to throw a number out there, assume ten students can move half as quick as one student. Then by the time you get to thirty students, you're moving 20% as fast as with ten students.
However, x% decreases with higher-salary teachers, and you can just move on without answering questions: "Ask me after class, we don't have time today." Finally, if you organize classes so similarly ranked students are together, the correlation in needing help increases, and the pace improves.
> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
Not with that attitude! Milei layed off 20% of his federal employees, and Musk 80% of Xitter. So, it is possible. They can protest, but I don't have sympathy for shitty teachers looking after their own interests.
> Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people?
I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors. Also, as I mentioned, the university pyramid scheme is pumping out more PhDs than they know what to do with. There are also many universities shutting down as enrollment drops. Finally, interviewing 2 million teacher positions is a gargantuan undertaking, but each town only needs a few dozen. The federal government can create a teachers' job board for people to apply to, and let local towns do the hiring. Lots of doctors move to the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, so I'm sure lots of teachers would too for a competitive salary.
> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up. If you really want a better spot, you can study harder for the next test. No one is *stuck* in tracks. Do you know how I got good at math? I just solved thousands of math competition problems I found on AoPS.com. I would have improved faster if I had a coach/teacher to guide me, but the resources are out there if someone actually wants to hop tracks. It'll be harder than just never losing your spot, but that's no reason to give up.
> This [olympiad problem->curriculum writers] doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
I call bullshit. The SAT/ACT do not go high enough to distinguish the top 0.1% from the top 0.5%, and other (American/state) standardized exams are even worse, which means the so-called professionals literally do not have metrics that can capture that signal to tune their curriculae against. On the other hand, olympiad problem writers/camp counselors have a proven track record of doing exactly that. Here are two anecdotes:
1) In elementary school, my gifted class' teacher was complaining that her evaluations looked bad, because her students never showed improvement. It wasn't because they didn't improve, it's just because they stayed at 99%.
2) When Luke Robitaille got second in MATHCOUNTS in sixth grade, the next two years of exams became much harder, solely to make sure he wouldn't get a perfect score. His eighth grade year had the lowest top twelve cutoff in history, but at least there was a full spread at the top.
At the very least, we should agree that smarter students need an Uncommon Core curriculum.
> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
>> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
> I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
You're doing the thing again where you apply your expertise to a domain you're naive to. Google for class size and outcomes.
>> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
> Not with that attitude!
Contracts are contracts. Attitude has nothing to do with it.
> I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors.
How do you deal with losing... let's just say 2m people from other high-value professions? Unemployment is at historic lows. You also haven't wrestled with finding ~$700b to pay for all of this. There's ~100,000 public schools in the US in ~13,000 school districts. You think you'll get good outcomes letting them all hire individually? Will you put caps on salary so smaller districts don't lose out?
You've honestly not thought through this at all. You're again walking onto an issue you're entirely ignorant of, and if you were in charge of it you'd thoroughly destroy it.
>> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up.
You're naive to the problems with standardized testing and trying to supplement with anecdata.
> [Weird takes on common core and standardized testing]
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
>> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
I'm gonna quote something from my response to Paul Graham's wokeness essay: "It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice." I'm noticing.
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
the answer is simple - these two groups should NEVER be in the same classrooms - NEVER. these two groups will soon approach being different species. The entire issue is that they ARE in the same classroom but shittiest programmer is not sharing an office with Googlers working on search algo - yet somehow this is acceptable in schools. I have to pay tens and tens of thousands of dollars every year to make sure my kid does not have to deal with that nonsense
> There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills.
My entire premise is it's way further up the list. I called you out originally for "adding layers instead of removing them." You won't even acknowledge my cruxes exist, in fact you "refuse to even continue considering it." It's like they say: insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Everyone you talk to from the other side is baffingly wrong, because you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I think the school->prison pipeline is a real issue, but I think a poor quality of education is a much bigger deal because smart, educated people generate exponentially more wealth since the industrial revolution. If you want what is best for everyone, you would focus more resources on top-performing students rather than less! Sure, top-performing students would turn out better than mid-performing students—even with fewer resources—but that's a tautology and an emotional appeal. I think the tricky part is to make sure top students give back to society once they graduate, but that seems more of a cultural issue to solve. Boring students to death probably doesn't help, though.
Now, you brought up that national testing + placement would mostly reflect socio-economic status. I think this is concerning because it lead to in-groups reinforcing themselves, which naturally decreases motivation for future rich people to help the rest of society. However, we already have examples of placement tests, and this isn't what happens! NYC has several "specialized" schools, including one of the best high schools in the nation, Stuyvesant. Admissions to Stuyvesant are entirely based on your rank on the SHSAT, yet 48% of their students are "economically disadvantaged" according to USNews. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I would expect lower or lower-middle class. This data also matches up with my intuitions: although intelligence is heritable (through genes or upbringing), there are exponentially more "economically disadvantaged" people than rich people, so even though rich kids are overrepresented, they are still outnumbered by poor(er) kids.
Also, keep in mind that rich people will always be able to pay for private schools or tutors if they find public education lacking. So, you are really only depriving poor students of any possibility of a good education by lumping everyone together, which is worse for reinforcing classism. As you mentioned, charter/private school outcomes are so much better because they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better oucomes. Why not give everyone that opportunity?
That's a little facetious, because not everyone has that opportunity. Some people are just not genetically predisposed towards exams, or they're being abused at home, or they have to work after school to buy food for their younger siblings. But, it doesn't really matter why someone cannot do/be better if we're unable to fix the why. Until it can be fixed, the problem is just a part of them and they'll be punished for it. This isn't very sympathetic, but it's the game-theoretical optimal approach for getting to the Pareto frontier.
You mention that blame/punishment essentially never works, which is probably because humans are not perfectly rational agents. Sure. I've definitely seen this when I play Risk online. You have to use different strategies when people are irrational/prone to mistakes, e.g. with novices it's usually good to make a big stack and wait for everyone else to noob-slam, while with masters it's better to work with the othe rplayers to slowly choke out the rest. Optimal strategies may be less tolerant to mistakes, and a common mistake humans make is, "this person hurt me, so I will hurt them even more," without considering why they were hurt. A common theme I saw in school->prison pipeline studies is that youth get disaffected with society/the justice system, so they end up committing more crimes. If people really are being irrational, in such a way that punishment will not work, you really only have three options:
1. Force them into rationality.
2. Rehabilitate them through positive reinforcement.
3. Eliminate them from society, e.g. sending them to Louisiana/Australia, prisons/executions, or closed communities.
I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done. Nowadays, it probably isn't cheaper; even if the average inmate spends just as much time in prison as out of it, they are probably close to net-positive to society. The cheapest solution probably is rehabilitation for most people except the unfixable, and even there, life in prison is probably cheaper than execution.
So, I think I agree with you about rehabilitation, but probably not for the reasons you cite. I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work. Conservatives have a bias towards everything being a stable system [which is true; you are exponentially more likely to end up in more stable (determined by transition probabilities) trembling-hand/thermodynamic equilibria], which is probably why they're all pro-punishment and such. Note that rehabilitation can still be cheaper, but at least punishment would work. It's only when you have unstable systems that punishment might not work at all. It's a little worrying to think that America's system might be unstable right now, but the race riots and past two elections kind of show it is. More accurately, it's too easy to transition out of its current maximum for punishment to really dissuade future malcontents.
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Alright, let's return to education. I think we're in agreement that:
I) The school->prison pipeline is real.
II) Imprisonment is expensive, probably moreso than rehabilitation.
As I put at the top, we probably disagree that:
III) This cost is more than that of a poor education system.
I think rehabilitation through the education system is far more expensive. Here's just a back-of-the-napkin calculation. Suppose that all inmates are directly a result of the school->prison pipeline. It costs ~$70bn/yr to incarcerate them, but let's also assume we're missing out on 2 million people * $65k/yr = $130bn from jobs they could be working. This amounts to about $200bn/yr in costs to society.
Now, the number of billionaires increases by about 36 each year, and the average billionaire has $7bn. If a better education were to double the number of billionaires produced each year, this would entirely offset the cost. Of course, billionaires are usually better at capturing value than producing it, but at least some educated STEM guy below them is producing the value. I think this is entirely doable by expelling more students. In fact, I think the justice system will only start costing more than the wealth generated from better education (through the top students) once the pitchforks and torches come out.
Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good. Most legislators care about the quintiles, not the top 0.1%, plus the wokists hate inequity. And, even bottom schools need much better teachers than are currently around. That's why I want to raise all salaries to $300-500k/yr.
You mentioned that only $236bn is spent on ~4m teachers, but there actually is another $600bn going elsewhere. If you want an average class size of 20 students, you only need ~2.5m teachers, so it should be possible if you strip everything else to the bare-bones. My elementary school class was taught in a portable, and I think that's better than having a shitty teacher.
You've done a lot of thinking here, but if you did 80% of the thinking and 20% of the reading you'd reach better conclusions. There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires (this is a product of income and wealth inequality, not educational system efficacy).
> I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
> a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
> b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people, but whatever it might be let me inform you there are lots of countries/governments/societies in the world that aren't doing so hot, and they've been doing not so hot for quite some time. Is this some kind of quasi-rational-market hypothesis for societies? Nowhere is this true. Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why did Black people continue to live in States that practiced segregation? Why do people still eat unhealthy food, or smoke, or drink?
> If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done.
I think relying on the actions of governments who knew almost nothing (Earth is flat, what is air, diseases are punishment from God, the sun revolves around Earth) is a bankrupt argument. Governments have almost never been data-driven. Reducing the rubric of how governments/societies should act to "do whatever's cheaper" is... so wrong I don't even really know where to start. How do you justify investments? How do you justify things like entering WWII or The Manhattan Project? How do you know what's cheaper or will result in the most gains ahead of time? This can't be a real argument. Are we about to go the entire history of how governments work? I refuse. Do more reading.
> I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work.
Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts. Again you're naive to the criminal justice system. If we don't think better systems/environments lead to better outcomes and worse systems/environments lead to worse outcomes, why are we trying to improve the US educational system at all? A kid's educational attainment is preordained right? Even if you think this is a straw man, it does us no good to consider "some kids just suck" when building an educational system, again because of the School-to-Prison Pipeline where bad outcomes are so lopsided.
> Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good.
Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
> I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people
Google is your friend. Essentially, in a counterfactual universe where they never existed, the world would be better off. If you have more negative externalities than positive externalities, your society is draining wealth, and will eventually disappear.
> Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts.
We've already gone over this. Go rehabilitate, I don't care. Just rehabilitate people in a way so they aren't actively commiting crimes against education.
> Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
You are trying to coerce one group into sacrifcing enormously for another group, and you say my system is immoral? If sacrifices have to be made (they don't), why do you get to choose who bleeds on the altar?
Also, there is plenty evidence that super students do offset the cost. For example, North Korea's system puts disproportionally more money into their top students, and they usually rank higher on the International Mathematics Olympiad than every European country except Russia. The benefit is mostly for their defense: they really needed nuclear weapons, and they couldn't get them without investing in their best students. They might not even exist as a country today if they didn't do so. What could be more beneficial to their society?
> There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires
Look, everyone acknowledges Europe has a stagnation problem, America is better for startups, and the USD being the principal reserve currency makes Americans richer. You cannot directly compare countries like that. I know you're smart enough to recognize that, so I'm astonished you wrote this down.
Ideally, you could just randomly assign two policies, and see which works better. But in the real world, pretty much all studies in education are surveys, and it's hard to account for differences in space (countries/culture/socioeconomic status). Even differences in time (when new policies are introduced) have confounders, but less so. If you look at those studies, you'll find that new policies that throw money at smaller class sizes or higher-quality teachers lead to better educational outcomes. It's uncontroversial to say that better educational outcomes lead to better salaries, and higher wealth generation. (BTW, I'm not using wealth to mean USD, I mean quality-of-life. The USD is just a convenient proxy. Not sure if that was clear earlier.)
Tracking is more controversial. However, the one study that did just randomly assign tracking to 120 first grade classes found it benefited everyone:
Most other studies use standardized exams (e.g. the PISA), and let me remind you, those are not difficult enough to see improvement for the upper percentiles! You flippantly dismissed it, but it's a huge deal. If your national assessment were the AMC 10/12 the bottom 50% would all score zero points (really 37.5, but that's irrelevant), and tracking would look like a resounding success if the top few thousand showed improvement.
> To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
This upsets me. Have you, this whole time, only been arguing for your in-group? Every time you said, "what is best for society," did you really just mean what is best for the people you care about? I, too, want what is best for my in-group, but I've tried to talk about how ranking/expulsions/etc. would increase wealth generation, and improve everyone's quality of life.
Quite frankly, your in-group needs my in-group, not the other way around. If we really are just trying to capture value for our in-groups, people in mine could just give up on public schools and go home-school their kids. I don't think this is optimal for either of our in-groups, but you have to acknowledge that if you want certain people to go to public school, you can't be defecting against those very people! If we really do have a conflict between two in-groups, why do you feel entitled to anything from the other side?
You've mentioned the school->prison pipeline, and how a lack of education brings out the pitchforks and torches. This is entirely true on the other side as well. As you saw in the comment section, a lot of smart people literally feel like school was prison to them. They were bullied, abused, had no freedom, etc. We've both acknowledged that bad students may become disaffected with school and society (if we don't rehabilitate properly), but only I've seemed to recognize that good students will too. Perhaps the difference is, disaffected bad students become violent, while disaffected good students become quantitative traders. Well, guess what? If your entitlement comes through a threat of violence, the correct response is to eliminate that threat.
Maybe you are alright with threatening violence, but I'd rather we not fight. And we don't have to. Society holds itself together through mutually beneficial deals (and a plethora of convenient lies). The minimum I'm asking for is for public schools to be mutually beneficial. This is why, although I think it is best for society to put extra resources into their top stuents, I am okay spending only equal resources.
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
"Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind.
They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant.
Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn.
Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
> If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled.
So if you're a kid who's already struggling, you get sent to be surrounded by other kids who are already struggling.
> you only have one chance really to get an education.
That's true for the bad kids too.
I 100% get where you're coming from. My kids come home from school and tell stories about disruptive stuff other kids do and how much it gets in the way of the school functioning effectively.
At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? The kids that have behavioral problems are much more likely to be that way because they have a bad home life. So if you expel them, they're missing out on education and they're spending more time in a bad environment. They're not going to get any better after that. Then what? Now they're a year behind academically and have the shame of being expelled. Their behavior is likely even worse because they spent a year not being socialized in a bad environment. So they're even worse next year, and they get expelled again.
Eventually, they stop going to school entirely. But at least here in the US, the number of jobs available to people without any kind of school degree gets smaller every year. So now they can't find work.
What do desperate people do? Commit crimes. So now we have a system that effectively just produces uneducated mentally unhealthy criminals.
I think you're missing something. Getting expelled doesn't mean you didn't attend school for the remainder of the year. Getting expelled meant you were sent to a school for expelled kids. If you got expelled from there, you went to a school for expelled x2 kids. In the US, it's illegal to not attend school under the age of 16.
>and have the shame of being expelled.
Shame is a powerful motivator, but only works sometimes. The alternative is to ignore the behavior or reward it, both worse solutions IMO.
I think the idea is if kids are disruptive, put them with other disruptive kids so the amount of disruption is minimized. All the kids in the disruption school are already disruptive. Also, you don't want to teach the current non-disruptive kids that being disruptive is acceptable, otherwise, you'll just create more disruptive kids by inaction.
Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools? Do you understand just how bad your behavior has to be to actually get expelled?
"At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? "
The most important thing is to NOT allow them to prevent other kids from getting an a good education.
> Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
>Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.
The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.
Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.
> Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them?
Bad for whom? If you have the two options:
(A) Bad for people causing negative externalities.
(B) Bad for people causing positive externalities.
I will choose the former over the latter every time. Sure, it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since they're expelled from school, but it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since this other kid wasn't expelled from school.
Your solution it to let disruptive children ruin the education for all students so that no one gets a good education? You are making home-schooling sound much more appealing. Public Schools aren't supposed to be daycare centers, they are supposed to teach children.
I think you and many others in this discussion presume that kids fall into a neat binary classification:
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time.
A closer picture of reality is that:
1. People go through good and bad periods. An "good" kid might become a "bad" kid for a year while going through the divorce of their parents. A "bad" kid might get the structure or diagnosis they need and blossom into their better potential. Kids mature at different rates and times.
2. Being around "good" kids is good for "bad" kids. If the people in their home life are awful, having a community of mentally healthy kids around them during the day can be very helpful for learning how to behave better.
3. Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. Obviously, it's not OK for some kid to bully or abuse another. But short of that, it's often useful and educational for kids to be exposed to a variety of personalities and maturity levels. Do we want our kids to grow into adults that have the skills to take care of and help other people who are struggling? I do. They can learn many of those skills in school by being part of the support network for bad kids.
Often, when they do, it turns out that kid wasn't so bad in the first place.
Overall, this simplified mindset is one I see all the time where we look at situations as a consumer: Is this a thing I want to "purchase" or not? Instead, it's better to look at the entire situation as an environment that you are both consuming and yourself part of.
They always talk about "it takes a village". We all both need a village and are the village for each other.
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
My experience in K-12 proves that this is in fact largely TRUE.
" Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. "
This is just a mind-numbingly stupid take. A 10th grader taking advanced calc and programming robots doesn't benefit from being forced to interact with an illiterate 19 year old who has been held back 3 times and steals his lunch money every day. This is in fact almost a human rights violation for the smart kid.
"I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time."
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said...
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy.
But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions.
Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
I do think it's totally fair to put pressure on the school to reduce mainstreaming of kids with major behavior issues. But it's really not about "tolerating" or "not tolerating"- you're witness a system failure and responding by making the problems worse for everyone but the wealthy in a society where governance is premised on the population at large being well educated.
* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.
Unfortunately there are a several things at play:
* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.
* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).
* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.
IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.
It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.
Kids with major behavioral issues should be getting a bootcamp-style education, where their tendencies can be held in check by adequate physical supervision. This is not about denying anyone an education - if anything, it's doing the exact opposite and addressing their unique educational needs in the most effective way.
While I certainly agree that specialized care and instruction is needed, it is unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures than they will to heavy-handed discipline. Appropriate settings with professionals trained in behaviors (IE the management and alterations of) can have substantial success, especially if the home environment is not antagonistic/trauma inducing.
> ...unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures...
These things are not mutually incompatible. Kids with autism who actually have major behavioral issues will clearly benefit from some physical supervision, in addition to whatever autism-specific intervention may be most appropriate for them. Similarly, rewards for good behavior can often go hand-in-hand with some sort of more rigorous discipline for those who persist in damaging and harmful conduct - these things will hopefully be complementary.
It hardly matters to other students WHY a particular student is making it very hard for them to learn and using up all the teacher's time. Only that they ARE.
Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.
Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.
If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation
To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom.
Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.
I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
You pay per-term, not per class, and you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.
Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.
I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.
WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.
> you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
Is it all based on self-guided learning? Because I can't see how this system could work with the classic system of bottom-up lectures accompanied by tutorials and exercise classes?
It’s self-guided. There aren’t lectures or anything. They have reading stuff they recommend, and there are course instructors you can reach out to if you need help.
Some courses do have recorded lectures, but nothing live.
I think that there's a reasonably good chance that if school were like that by default, I probably would have done better. It's hard to juggle six classes at a time like you're expected to in American high schools.
If I had a magic wand and could make the education system however I'd like, I'd make it so every student spends the exact same amount of time on the subject, but I'd make it so you only ever manage a single class at once, instead of trying to interleave everything.
This isn't even that weird of a concept, even in the US; American summer schools will often do exactly this. Instead of doing an hour per day over the course of 180 days, you do roughly thirty six-hour days. That's how I took gym in high school, and how I retook calculus (even though I passed the AP exam first-try).
Honestly, I'd bet there are a variety of delivery models that would be most effective for each person. Having choice in that would really be amazing. Unfortunately, its also very hard to organize and measure.
Yeah, that's true. I'm not entirely sure how you'd implement it but it would be great if there was options to do the one-class-at-a-time model or the traditional one if you prefer, though almost by definition the public school system is (mostly) one-size-fits-all.
It's definitely not for everyone, and to be honest I'd recommend a trying a traditional university first if that's an option.
The reason I liked it is because I have always just been better at teaching myself stuff than being taught. I like working at my own (usually faster) pace and I really hate waiting to make progress. WGU is a perfect system for someone with that mentality, particularly since it's inexpensive.
I think the quality of the education is "ok". I think you'll leave with a good enough education in computer science to be "useful", but I will acknowledge that the fast-pace does make it easier to get away with skipping the boring stuff than it would be with a traditional school.
If you already have a lot of experience with software, WGU can work as a "legitimizer" if nothing else, though. I had a bit of a complex about dropping out and not having a bachelors. That pretty much went away once I got my bachelors from WGU.
Oh! Xir entire software developer career has been built on skills xe taught xirselves from childhood (never took a CS course in college; majored in fine arts) so this sounds absolutely perfect! Probably would have crushed it there back in the day, too. Thank you!
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
Me and my friends were in the wrong side of the culture (tabletop RPGs, video games and heavy metal) and I can bet we would all be diagnosed back then as it felt it was mostly "feisty kids that don't fit".
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.
> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance. Farmers who don't understand evolutionary principles might not recognize the importance of rotating pesticides or implementing refuge areas to prevent resistance from developing.
Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
Thanks to ubertaco for the neat response point by point, but I don't think any of your points are relevant, even if they are true.
I know a couple of big-scale farmers in the US. They are Christian, and believe in Creation. That doesn't stop them from using the necessary pesticides, or choosing the adequate strain of corn seeds, etc.
Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron. Believing God created everything according to a design and purpose is not incompatible with acknowledging the presence of similarities and design patterns throughout all of Creation, and believing that doesn't suddenly poof take away your rational capabilities to think and understand things.
Either way, I was asking for is a real situation in which someone will be negatively impacted because they hold a Creationist belief.
Will a Creationist live a sad life without fully embracing the misteries of goose-bumps? Will a farmer not use pesticides, or choose the wrong one because Creationism? Will Advil won't work on a Christian because they don't understand that rats and rabbits are our cousins? Will their knees hurt more (or maybe less?) because they think humans were standing up from the beginning?
More generally all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line?
"Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron"
You kinda do have to be a moron to be a true young earth creationist. I went to Lutheran schools that taught me that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago and evolution was an evil plot created by Satan. By the time I was 15 I realized how stupid this was and how the theory of evolution fits the evidence and is self-consistent. One of the biggest realizations I had is that the theory of evolution, due to requiring such VAST amounts of time for evolution to occur, actually has nuclear fusion embedded in it as a dependency because nothing else could allow a star to shine for so long. When Darwin first proposed the theory a major and reasonable objection was the timescales needed because at the time it was thought that the Sun was powered only by gravitational collapse which would last less than 20 million years. Then this utterly absurd source of power for stars was discovered that could allow them to last for almost 1000 times as long.
> all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution
Could you please elaborate? I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to the scientific method?
If so, I really feel the need to insist that being Creationist or Christian is not exclusive or incompatible with that. Guess what, I am Christian, I believe in a Creator God and yet I am (surprise, surprise) an accomplished Software Engineer.
I can understand if you think I'm stupid because of my beliefs. That's your opinion and I'm totally fine with it.
What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. We're just working with different assumptions.
You have faith in Nothing, from which everything came, I have faith in Something (God) from which everything came. And it is faith indeed, because you don't and can't possibly have definite proven knowledge of the origin of things. You weren't there.
To you, nuclear fusion is evidence of evolution. Fine. To me, alongside the rest of Creation, it is evidence of God.
Therefore, you will reason a certain set of things, and I will reason a different set of things. Because we have different starting points, we will reach different conclusions.
"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "
They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.
Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.
The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.
You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the witch trials (medieval and contemporary), among so very many other examples.
Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
> Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
As @arkey points out, this happens with atheistic beliefs as well. By numbers communist purges have killed vastly more people than all religions combined just due to the numbers of people involved in modern ages.
The denunciations are very similar with actual evidence rarely being required or needed. Or it’s based on some characteristic of being on an outside group. Netflix’s adaptation of the Chinese authors book “Three body problem” gives a visceral showcasing of what that would’ve been like as one of the characters father is denounced and killed during that time for having “anti-Marxist” beliefs like gravity.
I’ve been to the Pol Pot’s killing trees in Cambodia where they slaughtered millions of people. Anyone who was educated in any way were considered polluted by capitalism and killed. Things like having spectacles was sufficient evidence.
I’ve seen the holocaust monuments in Berlin and Tel Aviv where the ideals of racial purity based on pseudo scientific interpretations of evolution were a key philosophical underpinning.
Actually much of the anti-evolutionary zeal in the US can be partially traced back to progressives (of that period) use of “evolution” to justify mass forced sterilization of “undesirables” by several US states during the 1910-1930’s.
Really humans are pretty flawed with any belief system. You fool yourself if you think “scientific” or “atheist” are any hindrance to these group behaviors.
Oh honey, xe are visibly queer. None of the above is new to xe, as a matter of survival. And a matter of sanity, as xe were raised to believe that the world was created from whole cloth six thousands years ago and that dinosaurs either lived with humans or were an invention of the devil.
There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution. And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic than German fascism was inherently Catholic (it certainly wasn't atheistic) nor US democracy inherently Protestant. Anyone doing anything "in the name of evolution" is projecting their own hate and small-mindedness onto whatever convenient vocabulary at hand, as has happened over and over and over long before science. Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications. But xe also expect the same of others in kind. Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime? Because actual science has no patience with such nonsense whereas xir original point still stands. We can resume this discussion after that.
What about the tens of millions of people who have been killed because atheism?
But how about this: the first time that any relevant powers decided that slavery was wrong at a global level was due to Christian beliefs, fancy that. And luckily they went on to impose that moral belief to the rest of the world. (England, France vs. Slavery)
It's true that a lot of evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but that's not of Christianity. If I came to your home and punched you in the face in the name of your mother, would you blame your mother?
But Christianity and the Bible have been abused very wrongly by evil powers as tools for control, something possible through deceiving illiterate, uneducated people.
As some other comments mention, Protestant Evangelicals made a big push for literacy precisely so people could read and interpret the Bible themselves, without depending on interested third parties.
Anyone taking a little time to read the Bible will see and understand that the Crusades were wrong, racism is wrong, oppressing women is wrong, and so on.
To play the devil's advocate here, as someone who grew up homeschooled and in a culture of "micro-scale evolution exists, but macro-scale evolution has not been demonstrated":
>Antibiotic resistance
...is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. Recognizing it does not require belief in a prehistoric common ancestor for all organisms; it just requires observing changes that happen on a much smaller and more rapid scale.
>Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
This is non-falsifiable conjecture about a pre-historic past based on observation of present structures. It is equivalent to "we obviously know that dinosaurs did not have feathers, because their skeletons do not have feathers, and feathers would have made them more visible to predators, so they wouldn't have had feathers."
>Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance.
...which, again, is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. You can notice pesticide resistance occurring in pests and rotate your pesticides without having to sign on to the unverifiable claim that this happens because all life derives from a single organism.
>Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
This is more non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture based on observation of current structures. Is it necessary to believe a particular set of conjectures about the origins of mammals' biological similarities in order to recognize the fact in front of you that the mammals are biologically similar, and thus some mechanisms of action may apply across species, provided those similarities are retained?
>Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
...which, again, is non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture that has no bearing on recognizing the existence of the verifiable current-day reality in front of you: humans have back and knee pain. Is it necessary to accept a particular set of unprovable conjectures about the distant-past origins of this particular skeletal structure in order to make decisions about how best to treat a symptom that exists today resulting from the skeletal structure that you see immediately in front of you?
But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
The ask of evolution and science in general is to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:
>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."
Want to have your mind blown? The creationist fallacy of "irreducible complexity" isn't just wrong for eyeballs and flagellum but for upward complexity as well. And lateral complexity.
OK, for falsifiable how about evolution predicts patterns of genetic similarity between species that match their apparent morphological relationships - a correlation that didn't have to exist but does.
That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.
It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.
"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."
Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.
That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."
That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."
As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.
It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.
Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.
It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
> It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
Is it though? Any sources to back that?
From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.
I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
Are we talking young-earth creationist or "God triggered the big bang and guided evolution" creationist? Because there is a huge difference between them!
Young earth creationists are scientifically ignorant by definition.
Young-earth creationist, as in "God created everything from scratch in 7 days".
There are many scientists out there that believe in that. They are not scientifically ignorant, they just believe different stuff from you, which, mind you, unless you've seen all proof and understand everything about it to the very last detail, you just hold a faith-based belief of what you're told about by a specific bunch of people/books.
People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on.
Not intending to start a flamewar here or anything, but the fact is that even if there's a lot of evidence for many claims about it, the THEORY of Evolution is not failsafe let alone definitely proven.
You can choose to go with it until we have something better, that's your choice.
Allow that same choice for the rest of the people out there.
"There are many scientists out there that believe in that. "
Not any GOOD ones.
"They are not scientifically ignorant, "
They are actually.
" they just believe different stuff from you, "
They believe very stupid things directly at odds with all evidence. All of modern technology is a result of the exact same logical thought that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line? Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
"People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on."
> Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
No. Why would I?
You see? You're jumping to absurd conclusions. The fact that I don't believe in Evolution does not mean I reject the Scientific Method, or technology, or reasoning, or logic.
I'm an engineer. I like and enjoy Science, building things, researching, learning, understanding, reasoning, creating. Don't try to make it incompatible or exclusive.
> Not any GOOD ones.
Maybe you should review a bit your history of Science.
I think the gp's worldview doesn't allow for such a person to exist. It's an anomaly and, therefore, must be fake. Otherwise, I can't make sense of the way they have been arguing in this thread.
I think it's you who doesn't understand how science works, making claims like the fact that Evolution needing something like nuclear fusion to explain longevity of stars, and nuclear fusion existing, must then mean Evolution is real.
According to the Scientific Method (which I obviously must not understand) an honest researcher would posit an hypothesis (which ideally should be falsifiable, unlike Evolution, or Creation for that matter) and then should rather try to prove that hypothesis false. That's what I do at my SE job. If you are unable to prove a falsifiable hypothesis as false, chances are you're right.
You see, because Evolution and Creation are not falsifiable, they need a certain amount of faith to be accepted. I acknowledge my faith in God, and I acknowledge that I cannot scientifically and undeniable prove the existence of God or Creation through purely empirical methods. That's actually a necessary aspect of it. I do, however, see a lot of evidence which points me to that way, and it points me to that way because of where (or rather, on who) my faith is placed.
You, like it or not, do have faith too, but it is placed in a different set of persons and scriptures. You have faith in Modern Science. It's a faith, a 'trust' if you will, you choose to risk having in a lot of data that, by the way, you cannot possibly have had the chance to validate personally.
I invite you to honestly reflect on that.
This will most likely be my last response because at this point I am not sure this conversation is constructive at all.
Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
Our times are like they are in part thanks to their work.
Yes, there is much more knowledge at least content-wise nowadays than then. Does that make their contributions ignorant, or invalid? Remove what they did in their day, what are we left with?
no. I don't really understand what your point is. Are you trying to argue:
> They were Christian, thus you can be a scientific genius in your time and still Christian.
? You have to keep in mind, these people were scientific geniuses in a time where people had recently established that the Earth orbited the Sun. The first periodic table wasn't compiled until 1869, hundreds of years later. Given they had no alternative explanation, is it any wonder they were content with answers from religion? I'm not sure you realize this, but the whole separation of religion and science is a recent phenomenon. They used to be the same thing, just explanations for how the world worked. It was only when empirical evidence and scientific theories started explaining the world better than "the gods" that religion began claiming a separate sphere of influence.
So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
"So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
I'm not sure you understood my comment (despite quoting it). Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist? What about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or practically any other religious person who home schools?
Your thesis seems to be that religious people are anti-science, which is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype to be pushing in 2024.
Do you think there are many religious parents who choose homeschooling because it lets them reinforce their worldview? GP says he was raised in such a household, I have friends who were homeschooled for that reason. There are probably many religious people who just find public schools uncouth, but I think there are more who homeschool primarily for easier indoctrination. I don't think GP is automatically assuming anything about individuals, they're just pointing out that a significant fraction of the homeschooling population will come from Evangelical Young Earth Creationists.
Based on your comment, I would assume you are religious. Quite frankly, religious doctrines are anti-science, or more accurately anti-epistemology. The Young Earth Creationists are a dim example of this, but even your generic Christian believes in lichs based on two-thousand-year-old hearsay. You say this
> is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype
but why? It seems more true than any religion. I think you could make an argument that it's impossible to convince people they're wrong, so to avoid fighting you should avoid making such comments, but that's empirically not true.
I was being absolute in my language because I was trying to understand the extent of GP's views on this subject. Sure, it's entirely possible that it didn't translate across and that we're talking about a "significant fraction" of religious people raising scientifically ignorant kids. Even then, it's almost impossible to prove because we're not operating with a well-defined meaning for "scientifically ignorant."
However, you've now moved the goalpost by stating that "religious doctrines" are anti-science. That wasn't the original argument. We're talking about whether or not religious people, who homeschool, will necessarily produce scientifically ignorant children.
Nonetheless, the more I think about this, the more the conversation is pointless because we'd spend an eternity working out what scientifically ignorant looks like. A person may agree with 80% of the scientific theories in the world and disagree on 20% and someone might say that makes them "scientifically ignorant." Which I find amusing, considering the amount of fraud going on in modern scientific journals.
I want to make it clear that the main issue is anti-epistemology. Trusting authority figures on "the science" isn't much different than trusting authority figures on "the gods", but there is a big difference between how the two schools of thought investigate new ideas. Religions take their axioms as inviolable, while science usually treats them as convenient beliefs until better ones come along.
I'm less worried about people being scientifically ignorant than people who lack the ability to think through ideas (specifically, most religions have built-in thought-stoppers such as "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith"). For example, Socrates was a great thinker, and even though he was terribly ignorant by today's standards, I wouldn't be worried if our society was composed of people like him. I am worried about people who have literally been indoctrinated out of the capacity for reason.
Well, regarding that concern, we are in total agreement. However, I have many religious friends, and none of them have demonstrated being indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason (and yes, a few were homeschooled).
I'm not suggesting these individuals do not exist, but I find it very troubling to make blanket statements like the GP's. As I said, it's a stereotype I often see on HN, and I think it's very distasteful as it eliminates an entire group of people from the conversation because "they can't reason."
Ah, I on the other hand have met many individuals who have been indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason. I grew up in a town with a relatively high population of Mormons. Their reasoning capacities are mostly fine when it comes to science/work/etc., but very stunted when it comes to discussing their religion (which is important because it defines their politics). You'll essentially get conversations that go like this:
- Why do you think gay people shouldn't kiss?
| Because it's wrong.
- Why is it wrong?
| Gay people can't have children / homosexuality is bad.
- Why is that bad?
| The Bible says it's important to have children / The Bible says so.
- So, if you didn't think God was real, or the Bible was accurate, you would think it's okay?
| Eh, but I know it's true. I know acting on gay feelings is wrong. [Counterfactuals don't make sense when the counterfactual is impossible.]
- How do you know this?
| Well, I prayed about it.
- Okay, but lots of people pray and think their religion is the right one.
| Yeah, but you'd expect the TRUE religion to have <specific features about Mormonism>. And only Mormonism has that.
- Couldn't a Muslim or Hindu say something similar?
| No, they don't have all the <specific features>, just some of them. Like, sure, other religions have some of the truth, but we have all of it! Aren't modern prophets great?
- Well, I'd expect a true religion to not have <specific flaws>.
| Those aren't true. Our founder didn't have sex with a bunch of teenagers.
- The second guy, Brigham Young, did, didn't he?
| Um, well, that was normal for the time.
- It really wasn't. You can look at the census data, and even though some teenagers married other teenagers, almost none of them were marrying men 20 years their senior.
| Well, God commanded it, so it must have been alright.
- How do you know God commanded it, and your leader didn't just make this up?
| Because I know the Book of Mormon is true and I have a testimony of Joseph Smith!
- Okay, why do you think so?
| It says right there at the end of the Book of Mormon that you can pray about it to know it is true. And I did, and I've had so many personal experiences that reaffirm my faith.
- Okay, but lots of people pray and think their religion is the right one. Couldn't a Muslim or Hindu say something similar?
| No, they don't have all the <specific features>! Look, I don't know what you've been reading about Mormons, but you can't expect to get accurate sources from random internet sites. If you want to know the truth, you have to read the Book of Mormon and ask God. The devil will try to lead you astray, but you just need to cultivate a seed of faith and hold onto it until it grows into an unshakeable foundation.
- Um... that's circular reasoning. How do you know that's how you can get the truth?
| Oh, I see. You're some anti-Mormon, aren't you? You were never interested to begin with, you were just trying to trick me up. Well I don't want to hear your bigotry anymore. All my friends/family who are Mormon are the best people I know, and even if you don't believe in my religion, you have to acknowledge its fruits are good.
- Didn't we get into this conversation because you said gay people shouldn't be allowed to kiss each other? That isn't a "good fruit".
| No, according to my religion it is. God has a plan, you just have to open up your heart and believe.
" Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist?"
Because in the US this is largely true. And young earth creationists are most empathically anti-science. I know because that is how I was raised and I have rejected all of that nonsense.
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them.
The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.
Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!
There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values
Here's some tangential anecdata.
I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.
Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.
Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
Something like a new roof is an expense known literally years in advance. You know when something will be due for repair or replacement due to reaching the end of design and/or useful life. The proper way to handle that kind of expense is to set aside some money every year in the budget toward an earmarked fund until you have enough when time comes to buy a new roof.
So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.
Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.
So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
I don't see why this is preferable to lower taxes that just cover operations and short term maintenance, with separate bond issues to play for things like new roofs which are expensive but only come up ever 20 to 30 years.
There is quite a bit of variability in how long a roof lasts, because it can be greatly affected by weather and climate and accidents. With the "save for it out of a surplus" approach you'd need enough surplus so that you'll be ready if it turns out your current roof needs replacing on the low side of the roof lifetime range.
But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine? Do you just keep adding each years surplus to the roof fund? I bet taxpayers wouldn't like that. They'd want taxes to be lowered to get rid of the surplus.
But then when you do replace the roof you'd have to raise taxes back to what they were to start building the fund for the next roof. So you still end up with the pattern being higher taxes for several years after a roof is installed and then lower taxes from then until it is time for the next new roof.
That's the same pattern you end up with under the "use a bond issue to pay for a roof when needed" approach.
>So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
Yes.
Simply put: If you can't or won't budget+save for a known future expense, I'm not giving you money to pay for it when it comes knocking.
>But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine?
Save what's in there for when the roof really hits end of usable life and either: A) Keep adding to the fund if it's justifiable, or B) Remove the line item from the budget and reduce or reallocate the budget accordingly.
We're not talking about RNGesus throwing down a randomass thunderbolt at the school and blasting a randomass hole through it on a randomass Thursday. We know reasonably when the roof will need replacing for an absolute fact, and at least a ballpark estimate how much it will cost.
Fiscal discipline goes a long way to convincing me to pay (more) taxes.
Lol never worked construction for government gigs? I was once hired on as a laborer for a city government funded arts building. The construction boss had to buy a very expensive and gawdy table from the mayor's kids. The government was paying themselves. It's likely 30% roof and 70% old boys network of hiring select people for favors.
I'm quite aware what the several million buckeroos are actually "needed" for, and I'm all the more vindicated in telling the school and county to get fucking bent.
Unfortunate that kids have to indirectly get caught in the crossfire, but such is life.
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
Those numbers are actually painting a rosier picture of what is actually happening in Baltimore and other cities. In 23 out of 150 school, zero students - none! - were proficient in math. Not a single student. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig.
>The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
>Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
>But that’s not all. WBFF combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. In 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math.
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
Not saying they are useless but standardized tests only work for kids who take them seriously.
I recall taking these as a kid, and there were kids who would just fill in the bubbles. They would not even read the questions. They thought it was funny.
So when we have anecdotes, we get told to look at the stats for objective facts. Alternatively, when we do have stats, we get told "no those numbers do not mean what you think they mean" as a way to dismiss the abysmal numbers. So which is it.
Let's face it, we all know it, just some of us are too scared to say it publicly. In large urban areas in America, there is a (large / huge / significant) portion of the school population that is illiterate, speaks non-functional english in the form of black-culture slang, the rest don't even speak english in an english-speaking country, and practically none of them are going to be functional adults that don't require assistance and handouts to survive.
I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
I can believe that they don't actually teach the grammar of Arabic or how to speak or write it, but they don't even translate the meaning of the verses to Urdu (or whatever the local language is)?
I'm not an expert in this area at all. But I was under the impression that for some of these schools, that is the case. My understanding is that some (many?/most?) Muslims believe that the Quran was a direct revelation from Allah in Arabic, and so translations are somewhat suspect, risking incorrect interpretations from humans.
I know that Muslims believe that translations of the Quran are of a lesser status, but I didn’t think that would extend to not even explaining their meaning to the students.
They usually do teach you to read Arabic, which is mostly the same script as Urdu. But you don't understand what you're reading which doesn't really make it any better.
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
But those kids who are "being left behind" are good to have vouchers too. You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
I had a bunch of random teachers teach really dumb stuff while I was in public school. I don't believe those things, because I had parents who were involved in my education. It's never a good idea to leave your kids education to the whims of someone else.
Public school doesn't have some magic monopoly on good ideas. And private/voucher schools aren't going to have a monopoly on bad ones.
Why would the kids not be able to leave public schools? They will all have vouchers?
> You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
Spending a second of logic on it and thinking critically, there won't. Why would a school empowered to be choosy and subject to profit motivations choose the pricier students to specialize that reduce their rankings?
And why do you think a flood of schools arguing germ theory is a lie be a public good?
I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things. Dinosaurs were fakes buried in the soil by the devil to test believers. Evolution is a lie by the government. And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know. I'm a somewhat special person though; I know many in my class that still believe without question. It's not a good thing for society overall to have such "knowledge".
As for why kids wouldn't be able to leave the public schools, some schools will be required to provide transportation. Others won't. Some will be able to be choosy, some won't. You see where this goes? Those schools which are choosey and don't provide transportation will end up selecting the most well off while those unable to be choosy and/or forced to provide transportation will be forced to shoulder those who aren't good performers who don't get into the choosy schools with a transit scholarship.
Ok, so… you went to some self-described example a school you are complaining about, turned out great, and are upset that kids might not keep going to known-failing schools?
Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
> Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
Maybe status-quo bias is so powerful that people will see an institution that fails at literally everything it tries to do and instead of concluding that it's a failing institution they will pick some other random thing and decide the institution must actually be about that, because the idea that the institution is actually pointless is too horrible to contemplate.
> I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things... And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know.
Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending? Do you not see where parents might see you in fundie school learning about how man rode the dinosaurs alongside a public school kid that somehow knows even less than you about history or biology, and think "hmm maybe I'd like to find something else"?
> Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending?
No, because I've seen the average of the extremist schools which will grow with the voucher program and they're far worse than the negatives I experienced. Education like Eve gives Adam two apples, how many apples does Adam have; it doesn't matter Jesus will come soon here's another chapter of the KJV.
Except there's no reason to believe extremist schools should grow significantly. Most people aren't extremists (pretty much by definition). In fact, good schools are a usual top tier concern when looking at housing. Your worry about fly-by-night schools extracting profits and fleeing is also not particularly hard to solve: hold them liable for damages/a return of n years of voucher funds if the school fails to meet standards and require them to carry insurance or post a bond to prove they can meet their liability. High performing schools or new schools associated to people/organizations with a previous success record will have cheap premiums. Dodgy schools will have expensive premiums or will be uninsurable. Your worry about special ed is also not that complex: give higher funds for those kids to offset their higher cost.
> Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
I'll say yes. Most people I've seen who have gone through that type of schooling are good members of society. They work jobs, they pay taxes, they have friends, they often go on to higher education, they raise families, and they may be happier than the average person. The outcome is perfectly fine.
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
87% of kids attend public k-12, and secular and Catholic schools together make up the majority of private, so if we're barely a step above Idiocracy, it seems a bit silly to point at the "man rode the dinosaurs" people.
I went to a young earth creationist Christian school and it messed me up. Most of us had a hard time adjusting to life outside the Evangelical Christian bubble. It's really hard to connect to others when your identity is tied up in believing a lot of outlandish things and it's hard to love yourself because you're given a long list of crazy rules to follow. I was told that kissing someone before I was married would taint my soul and whoever I married would be disgusted by me if I did so. Most people I've kept in touch with regret going to that school and every queer person I know has been absolutely traumatized by the experience. I'm happy, and by your criteria, a good member of society but that was despite my school. It took a lot of therapy, personal growth, and finding a community of people who actually care about me to be happy.
Catholics aren't generally young-Earth creationists, and overall the Church argues the age of the earth is a scientific not a religious question.
I totally agree there are many religious schools which are extremely high quality. Despite a few strange views at the school I went to, the general quality of education was quite high. However, I refuse to ignore the many other examples of schools which are not high quality. They should be called out, and there's no way I want my tax dollars going to teach their nonsense.
The thing is - the average school is terrible. NAEP scores show less than 25% reach "basic" proficiency in math, and reading is even worse.
I can't find any comparable stats on just religious schools, but I strongly suspect they are, on average, performing substantially better than non-religious schools. The reasons for that are more to do with the students than the schools, but the exact reason is inconsequential - the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education.
The typical claim of evolution is illogical. Even if a religious school solely and exclusively taught creationism while not even paying lip service to the controversy (which few to none do), it's not at all like a child's education would be permanently crippled. As the most important things learned in basic education are not facts, but skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic in particular.
A school which can be choosy in admissions will likely have students with better proficiencies. It's easy to have only top scoring students when you can kick out the bottom scoring ones.
> the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education
This is the point I'm making. Many people aren't going to end up choosing the school because of the quality of the education, they'll be choosing it because it aligns with their world view. That germ theory is a lie, the Earth is 5,000 years old, scientists are liars out to eliminate Christ from society, and that the only things you need to know is what is in the Bible.
Let's assume what you're saying is true, though I'm sure you realize you're being rather hyperbolic, at a minimum.
I think the purpose of school is to teach the fundamentals - reading, writing and arithmetic in particular.
I don't really care what worldview a school endorses so long as they are completely transparent on it.
Young Earth theory and creationism is one side of a coin - 80 genders, intersectionalism, and critical theory is the other.
If a parent is down with these worldviews, I see no problem so long as the school is excelling at their primary educational responsibilities, and also making their ideological motives transparent to parents.
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Same reason parents send their kids to public schools: because the price is right. Since we're importing legions of indentured servants, wages aren't rising, and parents have to make tough decisions in order to pay for basic necessities.
A thriving education system is an indicator of a prosperous society, not a cause.
Schools are a state and local matter. So just because you might be frustrated with the government in your area ain't my effing problem. To chastise all public schools is a false narrative.
Two, then you wouldn’t be opposed to eliminating the dept of education then, right? I hope Trump follows through on his promise you seem to agree with.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
This isn't pure statistics though. This dataset is massively biased. And out performed on what, that 2+2=4 or that 2+2=Who know what except that God gives us our provision despite what our eyes see and logic tells us
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.
Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?
Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.
Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.
Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.
I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest.
If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.
I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians.
A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea.
Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early.
Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.
Private schools are outrageously expensive.
Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.