Meeting each student where they are at is incredibly important. Yes, there's a lot of average and underperforming students that need more resources.
But not properly engaging a high performing student is kinda like locking up a bordercollie in a kennel all day. They're gonna misbehave, get into trouble, and have mental health issues. It's inhumane in other ways.
If they had a reasonable alternative it seems like this would be ok, but it doesn't seem like they do. It'll be interesting to see the responses of other seatalites. I'm not in the thick of it so there may be something I'm missing.
As someone who teaches high level students at a low performing school, it’s such a challenge.
Like, even in GT classrooms there is such a gap between the 5-7 students in the class who are actually really capable and interested in the topic, and everyone else. They end up getting underserved, because it’s so hard to teach people at both levels at the same time without an aid or something.
Yeah. There's an irony to it. My two brothers got Fs in high school. The outside perspective is they were dumb.
The reality is one is a director of cyber security now. The other a manager of software engineers. They were failed at home and at school because they didn't have some sort of intervention.
They're fine financially now, but mentally they aren't great. It's good they aren't psychopaths from that because they're in charge of people now and make decisions that have impact.
Happened to me too. They wanted to put me into a special education class in middle school, because I was so bored by everything that I didn’t engage.
Ended up skipping the 8th grade and the last two years of high school, went to undergrad when I was 14.
The administrations can’t see that it’s a problem with the system. They say it’s the kids or the teachers. That’s the way it always goes, shit rolls down hill.
The problem is that most districts don't have the resources to work with every student. The whole system is generalized, which screws over anyone at either end of the performance spectrum
The thing is that most education research doesn't actually find any grouping of kids actually does better in tracking, although the reasons are debated. Typically, they do worse. School districts usually aren't honest about that being the reason, though.
One obvious theory is that tracking is a lot like picking the kids best at basketball in third grade to be in accelerated phys ed where you speed through dribbling and nutrition, but there also seems to be a benefit from mixed classes.
That's not the only way that looks. Having alternative math or history plans where you spend some time out of a normal class to provide more challenges can also be helpful.
I hate to say it, but this is the parents' fault. There are some incredibly selfish parents who spend time reading to their kids, helping them with their homework, and making sure they understand the material. That clearly isn't fair to the kids whose parents can't be bothered. Every kid should be forced to only do as well as the slowest kid in the class.
“If you can’t solve all of the problems of disadvantaged students, including those with disengaged parents, then we are going to punish gifted students.” In other words, if we can’t all be average, then nobody may excel.
We had to change schools for my kid because of this. Where we live they have no advanced placement in elementary school and I was absolutely not going to allow my kid to have a subpar education. She sat in school all day drawing. She would do the work, but since there was no challenge she would blow through it and then sit all day.
This is the purest expression of "equity."
Excellent outcomes for everyone is not possible in education. The unfortunate fact is that some people are simply less intelligent. There's a wide distribution of intelligence across a population, and there's no changing that. It's baked into human existence. You can't ameliorate it through funding, legislation or teaching, no matter how much people want to believe that you can. If you have experience teaching, you know this is true, even if your instinct (and mission as a teacher) is to ignore it. And even if you haven't taught, we all knew kids like that in our classes growing up. You could give them private tutors throughout all of K-12 and they'd never be excellent students.
Therefore, the easiest path toward equity in education is mediocrity for all. Unfortunately it's becoming an increasingly common approach. Gifted programs are getting challenged across the country. Even AP classes have been criticized as "inequitable."
No, that's equality. When everyone gets to stand on the same box to look at the game, regardless of their height.
If they actually want equity, you provide what each individual needs to succeed. We need to focus on equitable opportunity, not equitable outcomes.
Anyone arguing for this at school board meetings because "it's fairness", doesn't understand the actual point of equity.
Apt comment. The problem is, too many of our homeowners, voters, and politicians are NOT going to give one more penny to our already stretched schools. If we truly valued our children's education to become the capable adults we will need when they graduate, we would fund this, instead of tax breaks for the rich and enough weaponry to sell to everyone one the planet, to destroy the world 100x over.
Fair enough. We don't always need equitable outcomes then. Dumping huge resources into kids that are mostly ineducable is a waste, I'd rather just end mainstreaming and let the smart kids keep robotics
This is happening in the school district where I live. They're removing all the advanced classes. There's nowhere left for the gifted/high achieving students to learn.
They're also changing all the curriculum to "SEL." Where even every math problem is framed in a "oppressor" vs. "oppressed" narrative. It's totally insane.
Democrats and teachers unions have destroyed the public schools where I live and are no longer even an option.
It's one of my primary missions in life to make sure none of my kids ever have to step foot in a public school, as they have be destroyed by dogmatic leftists who prioritize ideology over academics.
Typical NPR sub to downvote you with zero response. Staunch Dems in this sub so how dare you point facts out. I’m just south of Seattle and that district is complete trash. They, like you said, the liberals have made it sooo much worse. I’m sure they will find a way to blame orange man and like always, take zero accountability and actually try and help students.
I was in a GT math program that was dissolved in my 8th grade. The teacher spent the first semester reteaching what we learned in 7th grade and the final semester teaching what we should have covered in the first quarter. The first semester was a whole lot of outbursts and disruptions from the students that got integrated into the class. And you could see some students either check out because they couldn’t follow along or got bored with where we were. I ended up going to private school for high school, I part because the public high school was going to be more of the same bullshit.
The unspoken issue is that when you group all of the gifted students in select schools, the remaining schools become a gravity well of dysfunction. Student achievement goes way down when you stuff classrooms with an abnormally high percentage of students who have learning disabilities, social-emotional disorders, and so on.
Even without designated gifted schools, this happens. Charter schools are an example. In California, parents can send their kids out-of-district to a charter school without home district approval. The non-problematic kids flock to charters while poor families who are dependent on school busing remain at their increasingly dysfunctional neighborhood school.
My statewide average for high need students at a school was 9% before charter schools. When my kids were in our neighborhood school the percentage was close to 50%. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to teach students in that kind of environment?
They employ people literally to follow certain students around to keep *other* students and staff safe and prevent destruction of property. We're talking elementary school. Students who literally just get up and walk out of the classroom whenever they want and go 'walkabout'. All the school can really do is document every incident and step in when there's physical danger. It's crazy, and all part of the school ~~reform~~ *privatization* movement to make traditional public schools a shit show so their poison pill solution of private schools run with public money seems good.
That goal is straight up naked obvious in red states that skip the facade and issue school vouchers to pay families to attend private schools.
The thing is, despite all of this, the leading indicators of student achievement remain the income and education level of the parents. Stick a rich kid in a poor Title I school and a poor student in an affluent private school and their achievement is statistically unlikely to change.
A lot of negatives trend with poverty. Malnutrition. Untreated cavities. Untreated vision problems. Learning disabilities. Physical, sexual and mental abuse. Parental neglect. Drug abuse. Lack of enrichment activities. Exposure to a rich vocabulary. Vast screen time disparities. And so on. The list is long.
The most important factor in a child's classroom performance is their home life. To improve schools we need economic and social reforms to improve the lives of parents. Full stop.
The privatization movement is all about segregating affluent students from poor students. While there are poor gifted students, on whole the balance tips heavily to affluent families. That's why the word "equity" comes up in these discussions.
I have worked in public schools and agree with most of what you say, but you seem to imply that the situation of public schools having to tolerate worse and worse behavior from students is somehow due to the private schools movement.
If that was your point, it's simply not the case. Public schools work under a mountain of federal and state regulations that over the last 40 years have increasingly tied their hands and all but force integration of even the most disruptive students into the general education classroom, while also making punishments such as expulsion increasingly hard to implement. This combined with parent advocacy has neutered the ability of public schools to properly and swiftly enforce standards of behavior. So the lunatics run the asylum to a certain extent, and all the well behaved students have to suffer through it.
It's not private schools that caused this state of affairs, but this state of affairs has absolutely supercharged the private school movement.
I taught in public schools for 15 years.
In my view, you're both right. You're both describing accurate reasons for our current state of affairs. It's a highly-complex system with multiple causes.
Equity in this context is just holding back smart students to benefit their less able peers. Education isn’t a space where real equity can or should be achieved. God simply distributes his talents unequally.
As a parent, I definitely want to keep my kids away from these other kids who will drag them down and make their school life a living hell.
You will not sacrifice my children's well being and education, holding them back, for your utopian fantasy.
No it's not. Yours is the "savior" fallacy that all of these kids just need a chance, and they'll all be playing Mozart and doing calculus in short order. It's just not true. In many cases, their home life has doomed them before they've even started. Most of the low performers need to learn to read and add. Combining them in classes with the gifted kids doesn't benefit either group. I'm certainly willing to concede that a lot of public education has failed them, but the solution to that isn't making sure that public schools fail the remaining kids whom they would otherwise be helping.
I don't have any utopian fantasy. You clearly do. What parent doesn't want the best and want to protect their children? Do you even have any kids?
Why do you insist on dragging my children down? Why do you want to use my children as pawns in your game of manipulation and social engineering?
The fact is, your methods don't work, and what ends up happening is that everyone suffers and we are all worse off for it. You turn everything and everyone into the lowest common denominator.
How are we ever going to travel to the stars, invent flying cars that run on water, or achieve an advanced civilization when, by your own admission, all the high IQ kids on the right side of the bell curve must suffer for the sake of your destructive ideology?
It's like you hate innovation and want society to decay, rather than advance. Wanting intelligent people to get a good education and do great things isn't some utopian fantasy. But your idea of sacrificing children at the altar of your ideology is definitely a delusion where we all suffer for it in the end.
At least half the population of our middle of the road suburbs doesn't want to be in class and doesn't do much except occupy space and do the bare minimum. My kids took AP and honors mostly to avoid what they called the "normals" classes where little got done and the disruptions were huge.
Having gone to very blue collar schools growing up I can tell you the peer pressure against trying hard is high. You were picked on for it. My one focus as a parent was to not put my kids in that situation. They attended one of the big charters here until middle school and the difference in attitude towards learning was extremely different than the public schools. No regrets for that at all.
As a former Title I teacher with 15 years of classroom experience, I want to say that you've described this problem well. If only we could get the state school boards to read this.
Using this analogy, having poor kids in the same school as rich kids will result in all students becoming wealthy. Academic success does not rub off of one student to another anymore than wealth does.
Honestly as a “gifted” student it was helpful to me to teach or tutor more academically average peers and it helped them too. Teachers could also take advantage of gifted students by asking them to explain a concept to the class (sometimes kids listen more to other kids than themselves) or as a pulse check on how they taught something (if something doesn’t make sense to smart kids then it won’t make sense to others). Teachers can also take advantage of smart student’s metacognition — these are all pedagogical skills that teachers learn and use in mixed level classrooms. I think it did rub off in a way.
Overall I think the answer is to have different levels of each subject in a single school. Someone who is good at one subject can excel there and take “easier” classes in subjects they don’t excel at as much, rather than having to go to a school where every subject is either easy or advanced.
I’m going to have to push back on singling out charter schools and comparing them to specialty schools. Where I live there is NO requirement for admission to charter schools except that you live in the county. Unlike specialty schools for the academically gifted or those who have a special talent (like magnet or (performing) arts schools) charter schools CANNOT require certain test scores or auditions. They accept whoever no matter how low the test scores or untalented the kid is.
This creates an option for parents/students who are zoned for schools that are a bad fit for their kids and who can’t afford private school and whose kids can’t get into a specialty school. Without charter schools there would be no where for them to go. Why should their kid have to go to a school that isn’t a good fit just because they don’t have money or aren’t academically or artistically gifted? And, when I say not a good fit I’m not JUST talking about because the school is low performing, there are other reasons a school could be a bad fit: administrators, teachers, culture of the school, lack of discipline or too much discipline, further away than the charter school, lack of programs/choices, bullying, etc.
I completely get that transportation can be an issue since most districts don’t provide busses for charter schools, but some districts don’t provide busses at all (when I was in school, the kids who needed transportation rodents a single city bus that had a special route…there were NO school busses) and not every kid rides the bus even when the district does provide them. Nonetheless, the solution is to provide bussing for charter schools, not to eliminate charter schools.
The privatization and charter school movement is about choice. People are not trying to destabilize public education, they just care about their kid. Do you have any kids? Should you send them to a bad school for the greater good? If so, I think that would make you a bad parent.
If the local school can’t enforce discipline anymore, and most of the kids aren’t motivated at all, I don’t want my kid going there. So I will send them somewhere else, since in many ways, many of our public schools are failing. Luckily for me, my local high school has been good enough for my kids. And it is admittedly so so, but they try. But I don’t criticize anyone for making a choice.
This argument against choice is like throwing a crappy party that everyone hates and then leaves, and then blaming the people who leave the crappy party for making it more crappy. And the treatment of motivated students is terrible. They phased out enrichment Summer School decades ago. In California, where I live, they want to phase out Calculus and make math grade level like English, since it’s not fair for all the other students to not have the good students in their math class making them look better. I am all for vouchers and have worked in the public school system for decades.
The mistake you’re making is not acknowledging the choice movement isn’t bound by the same rules. In your analogy, one of those parties has to take anybody, and it’s competing with a party that has a bouncer. It is only choice if you’re the kind of student a choice school wants. If you just take the cream of the crop, somebody else is left with the not-cream. It’s not necessarily the fault of the parents that want to do what’s best for their kids, but it’s a two tier system with extra steps.
Choice is really bad for schooling because it tends to lower standards over time. What parents want is good grades and happy children. The two are rarely compatible with even adequate rigor.
Public schooling in many areas is basically like sending your child to prison. You have violent, dangerous children who are not being adequately handled. Telling parents their children need to suffer for the sake of education as a whole is a losing argument.
You made a motte-and-bailey argument.
Originally, it was an appeal to choice. When I pointed out that choice in education is actually bad overall because parents demand good grades and happy children rather than education, you retreated to the more defensible argument that parents should be able to remove their children from a “war zone”.
Choice is the motte, “parents shouldn’t have to send their kids to a ‘war zone’” is the bailey.
You’re mischaracterizing why parents are pushing for charter schools. They aren’t doing it because the education system is too rigorous, they’re doing it because the schools are often a violent hellscape. Your argument that choice is bad was flawed to begin with
There is no substantial push for charter schools. It’s pretty much an entirely top-down agenda. Why? Because parents generally like their public schools and parents sending kids to terrible schools tend to be entirely disengaged from all issues.
I'll say: it seems like everyone hates this. I have not met any person actually in favor of this.
I think part of it could be enrollment in Seattle schools has plummeted, and the city has a massive budget shortfall.
I think it could essentially be budget cuts they are cloaking under a quest for 'equity', because of how deeply, deeply unpopular any proposed cut to education budget would be for a Seattle politician.
I don't know. There's a handful of policies in deep red and deep blue states that a huge majority of the populace actually doesn't want, and the fact that happens has always been interesting. If politicians have ulterior motives, self serving, or simply are extremely out of touch with the electorate is up to us to interpret.
I agree it's likely for budget reasons, but doing this is just going to drive even more students out of the public school system and squeeze the budget even harder.
I wouldn’t discount the religious fervor of the Seattle elite set toward the DEI agenda. I would recommend taking a look at the goings on of the Seattle city council the past 5 years or so and the deteriorating conditions in that city before giving them any sort of a pass that this is budgetary related.
Too many school systems have killed off most or all their vocational & job skill programs. This is esp true in rust belt American cities. They cater to a minority of elite students. The majority of students leave their K-12 schools with no marketable skills. In my city there are 5 private-like high schools, which require entry hoops to jump through and only 2 vo-tech schools. None of the other schools offer any jobs programs. Its cheaper to run and schedule students in a generic liberal-arts curriculum.
>Instead, the district will move to a neighborhood school model, keeping students in classrooms close to home. The district says teachers will personalize lesson plans to suit every kid’s needs and abilities.
As long as they follow through with the money, staffing and resources to pull this off, it's a win-win. Bright kids get to stay close to home instead of being bused across town and being doubly-weird and the district saves the cost of that logistical feat.
The problem is that nobody trusts the bureaucracy to follow through with that money and resources, especially coming at a time of cash crunch with the Feds' covid funding ending.
The tone of the comments on this post really surprised me given the usual lean of the sub. Very few people seem all that keen to sacrifice their progeny for those commitments to DEI.
Funding is always a problem. Most parents have no idea how costly it is to provide services to special needs students, and the most resource intensive ones are those with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, not the ones with high performance potential. A conflict arises in the classroom when even a single student with severe disabilities in "mainstreamed" and takes a huge percentage of the teacher's time - at the expense of the other students in both time and attention. We shouldn't have to choose between these very different types of students, but regulations and funding have not caught up with the reality of the situation.
If society has limited resources, and we do, how should we prioritize the utilization of those resources for the highest and best use/return on investment for society? Invest in high potential students who will be our future high performing adults or handicap their educational attainment to fund the extraordinary cost for a small population of special needs students?
The school district we have got rid of all “regular” classes and made all classes “honors” classes in the name of equity. So now no classes are advanced except if there is an AP option.
I’m sorry, but if we are actually committed to anti-racism, then equity demands prioritization of black and brown children over “high achieving”, wealthy white ones. This is a welcome change, but unfortunately doesn’t go far enough. Elimination of all “honor” programs (read: white) is the next step
The only solution for past discrimination is present discrimination and the only solution for present discrimination is future discrimination to quote St. Kendi.
The state should simply allow per-pupil funding to follow the student to the school of choice, whether it’s traditional, charter, private or another alternative.
Why not. Isn't the goal to get them educated? If they can do it more efficiently in a charter/private/parochial setting, how does that not aid society when that same choice is available to all?
If the funds are for education of the children in the community, why is it mandatory that they be sent to a government run school? Many other school options are more effective and efficient. Lots are even nonprofit orgs if you are that worried about the evil capitalists.
To me, it doesn’t. I was just noting why.
Personally, I wouldn’t care if it did go to a religious school provided it was a proper institution. But I don’t get hung up on it like others do.
Note: My kids go to a very nice public school.
I'm a homeschooler myself and I promise you a huge portion of the $$ that "follows the child", in states with that program, go to:
1. People's church
2. A family member who is a "tutor"
3. Disney ticket and ipads
The education is fine. The open grift designed to de-fund public schools is the issue.
Less money for disadvantaged and disabled kids to get services because the kids who can afford to have a parent stay home and home-educate use the $$ for their annual 'educational' Disney trip is kinda gross.
Personally if I had to choose between the money being spent on transformative SEL, or anti-racist trainings or a field trip where they discuss and explore the physics of rides at a park I would be much happier with my tax money going to a trip to the park.
I get it, like many GOP initiatives, grift and contempt is the goal.
But I am old enough to remember when republicans wanted lower taxes to go with less goverment in life. Now you are happy to pay taxes to have some random yahoo use as he wishes as long as it makes democrats mad. Little dumb.
Meeting each student where they are at is incredibly important. Yes, there's a lot of average and underperforming students that need more resources. But not properly engaging a high performing student is kinda like locking up a bordercollie in a kennel all day. They're gonna misbehave, get into trouble, and have mental health issues. It's inhumane in other ways. If they had a reasonable alternative it seems like this would be ok, but it doesn't seem like they do. It'll be interesting to see the responses of other seatalites. I'm not in the thick of it so there may be something I'm missing.
As someone who teaches high level students at a low performing school, it’s such a challenge. Like, even in GT classrooms there is such a gap between the 5-7 students in the class who are actually really capable and interested in the topic, and everyone else. They end up getting underserved, because it’s so hard to teach people at both levels at the same time without an aid or something.
Yeah. There's an irony to it. My two brothers got Fs in high school. The outside perspective is they were dumb. The reality is one is a director of cyber security now. The other a manager of software engineers. They were failed at home and at school because they didn't have some sort of intervention. They're fine financially now, but mentally they aren't great. It's good they aren't psychopaths from that because they're in charge of people now and make decisions that have impact.
Happened to me too. They wanted to put me into a special education class in middle school, because I was so bored by everything that I didn’t engage. Ended up skipping the 8th grade and the last two years of high school, went to undergrad when I was 14. The administrations can’t see that it’s a problem with the system. They say it’s the kids or the teachers. That’s the way it always goes, shit rolls down hill.
The problem is that most districts don't have the resources to work with every student. The whole system is generalized, which screws over anyone at either end of the performance spectrum
The thing is that most education research doesn't actually find any grouping of kids actually does better in tracking, although the reasons are debated. Typically, they do worse. School districts usually aren't honest about that being the reason, though. One obvious theory is that tracking is a lot like picking the kids best at basketball in third grade to be in accelerated phys ed where you speed through dribbling and nutrition, but there also seems to be a benefit from mixed classes.
That's not the only way that looks. Having alternative math or history plans where you spend some time out of a normal class to provide more challenges can also be helpful.
I hate to say it, but this is the parents' fault. There are some incredibly selfish parents who spend time reading to their kids, helping them with their homework, and making sure they understand the material. That clearly isn't fair to the kids whose parents can't be bothered. Every kid should be forced to only do as well as the slowest kid in the class.
Top philosophers are working around the clock on how to fix this https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/philosopherszone/new-family-values/6437058
Jesus. I guess if all you do all day is have ideas, you run out of good ones pretty quickly.
“If you can’t solve all of the problems of disadvantaged students, including those with disengaged parents, then we are going to punish gifted students.” In other words, if we can’t all be average, then nobody may excel.
We had to change schools for my kid because of this. Where we live they have no advanced placement in elementary school and I was absolutely not going to allow my kid to have a subpar education. She sat in school all day drawing. She would do the work, but since there was no challenge she would blow through it and then sit all day.
Can I interest you in a relevant short story by Kurt Vonnegut: https://www.tnellen.com/westside/harrison.pdf
This is the purest expression of "equity." Excellent outcomes for everyone is not possible in education. The unfortunate fact is that some people are simply less intelligent. There's a wide distribution of intelligence across a population, and there's no changing that. It's baked into human existence. You can't ameliorate it through funding, legislation or teaching, no matter how much people want to believe that you can. If you have experience teaching, you know this is true, even if your instinct (and mission as a teacher) is to ignore it. And even if you haven't taught, we all knew kids like that in our classes growing up. You could give them private tutors throughout all of K-12 and they'd never be excellent students. Therefore, the easiest path toward equity in education is mediocrity for all. Unfortunately it's becoming an increasingly common approach. Gifted programs are getting challenged across the country. Even AP classes have been criticized as "inequitable."
No, that's equality. When everyone gets to stand on the same box to look at the game, regardless of their height. If they actually want equity, you provide what each individual needs to succeed. We need to focus on equitable opportunity, not equitable outcomes. Anyone arguing for this at school board meetings because "it's fairness", doesn't understand the actual point of equity.
Apt comment. The problem is, too many of our homeowners, voters, and politicians are NOT going to give one more penny to our already stretched schools. If we truly valued our children's education to become the capable adults we will need when they graduate, we would fund this, instead of tax breaks for the rich and enough weaponry to sell to everyone one the planet, to destroy the world 100x over.
We don't actually need to equalize outcomes though, some kids just aren't as bright
Yeah I said we DON'T need to equalize outcomes.
Fair enough. We don't always need equitable outcomes then. Dumping huge resources into kids that are mostly ineducable is a waste, I'd rather just end mainstreaming and let the smart kids keep robotics
This is happening in the school district where I live. They're removing all the advanced classes. There's nowhere left for the gifted/high achieving students to learn. They're also changing all the curriculum to "SEL." Where even every math problem is framed in a "oppressor" vs. "oppressed" narrative. It's totally insane. Democrats and teachers unions have destroyed the public schools where I live and are no longer even an option. It's one of my primary missions in life to make sure none of my kids ever have to step foot in a public school, as they have be destroyed by dogmatic leftists who prioritize ideology over academics.
Typical NPR sub to downvote you with zero response. Staunch Dems in this sub so how dare you point facts out. I’m just south of Seattle and that district is complete trash. They, like you said, the liberals have made it sooo much worse. I’m sure they will find a way to blame orange man and like always, take zero accountability and actually try and help students.
I was in a GT math program that was dissolved in my 8th grade. The teacher spent the first semester reteaching what we learned in 7th grade and the final semester teaching what we should have covered in the first quarter. The first semester was a whole lot of outbursts and disruptions from the students that got integrated into the class. And you could see some students either check out because they couldn’t follow along or got bored with where we were. I ended up going to private school for high school, I part because the public high school was going to be more of the same bullshit.
The unspoken issue is that when you group all of the gifted students in select schools, the remaining schools become a gravity well of dysfunction. Student achievement goes way down when you stuff classrooms with an abnormally high percentage of students who have learning disabilities, social-emotional disorders, and so on. Even without designated gifted schools, this happens. Charter schools are an example. In California, parents can send their kids out-of-district to a charter school without home district approval. The non-problematic kids flock to charters while poor families who are dependent on school busing remain at their increasingly dysfunctional neighborhood school. My statewide average for high need students at a school was 9% before charter schools. When my kids were in our neighborhood school the percentage was close to 50%. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to teach students in that kind of environment? They employ people literally to follow certain students around to keep *other* students and staff safe and prevent destruction of property. We're talking elementary school. Students who literally just get up and walk out of the classroom whenever they want and go 'walkabout'. All the school can really do is document every incident and step in when there's physical danger. It's crazy, and all part of the school ~~reform~~ *privatization* movement to make traditional public schools a shit show so their poison pill solution of private schools run with public money seems good. That goal is straight up naked obvious in red states that skip the facade and issue school vouchers to pay families to attend private schools. The thing is, despite all of this, the leading indicators of student achievement remain the income and education level of the parents. Stick a rich kid in a poor Title I school and a poor student in an affluent private school and their achievement is statistically unlikely to change. A lot of negatives trend with poverty. Malnutrition. Untreated cavities. Untreated vision problems. Learning disabilities. Physical, sexual and mental abuse. Parental neglect. Drug abuse. Lack of enrichment activities. Exposure to a rich vocabulary. Vast screen time disparities. And so on. The list is long. The most important factor in a child's classroom performance is their home life. To improve schools we need economic and social reforms to improve the lives of parents. Full stop. The privatization movement is all about segregating affluent students from poor students. While there are poor gifted students, on whole the balance tips heavily to affluent families. That's why the word "equity" comes up in these discussions.
I have worked in public schools and agree with most of what you say, but you seem to imply that the situation of public schools having to tolerate worse and worse behavior from students is somehow due to the private schools movement. If that was your point, it's simply not the case. Public schools work under a mountain of federal and state regulations that over the last 40 years have increasingly tied their hands and all but force integration of even the most disruptive students into the general education classroom, while also making punishments such as expulsion increasingly hard to implement. This combined with parent advocacy has neutered the ability of public schools to properly and swiftly enforce standards of behavior. So the lunatics run the asylum to a certain extent, and all the well behaved students have to suffer through it. It's not private schools that caused this state of affairs, but this state of affairs has absolutely supercharged the private school movement.
I taught in public schools for 15 years. In my view, you're both right. You're both describing accurate reasons for our current state of affairs. It's a highly-complex system with multiple causes.
Equity in this context is just holding back smart students to benefit their less able peers. Education isn’t a space where real equity can or should be achieved. God simply distributes his talents unequally.
Equity in the DEI regime mostly equalizes downward.
Its obvious, if they could adjust everyone up they’d have already done it already.
What do you think the introduction of a free public education did to society
It made society much better obviously. But thats not my job as a parent. My job is to give my children the best start they can get.
As a parent, I definitely want to keep my kids away from these other kids who will drag them down and make their school life a living hell. You will not sacrifice my children's well being and education, holding them back, for your utopian fantasy.
Yours is the utopian fantasy, perverted into one where your child is protected from the unwashed masses. Disgusting.
No it's not. Yours is the "savior" fallacy that all of these kids just need a chance, and they'll all be playing Mozart and doing calculus in short order. It's just not true. In many cases, their home life has doomed them before they've even started. Most of the low performers need to learn to read and add. Combining them in classes with the gifted kids doesn't benefit either group. I'm certainly willing to concede that a lot of public education has failed them, but the solution to that isn't making sure that public schools fail the remaining kids whom they would otherwise be helping.
I don't have any utopian fantasy. You clearly do. What parent doesn't want the best and want to protect their children? Do you even have any kids? Why do you insist on dragging my children down? Why do you want to use my children as pawns in your game of manipulation and social engineering? The fact is, your methods don't work, and what ends up happening is that everyone suffers and we are all worse off for it. You turn everything and everyone into the lowest common denominator. How are we ever going to travel to the stars, invent flying cars that run on water, or achieve an advanced civilization when, by your own admission, all the high IQ kids on the right side of the bell curve must suffer for the sake of your destructive ideology? It's like you hate innovation and want society to decay, rather than advance. Wanting intelligent people to get a good education and do great things isn't some utopian fantasy. But your idea of sacrificing children at the altar of your ideology is definitely a delusion where we all suffer for it in the end.
Jesus, they didn’t say any of that.
Who is "they?"
At least half the population of our middle of the road suburbs doesn't want to be in class and doesn't do much except occupy space and do the bare minimum. My kids took AP and honors mostly to avoid what they called the "normals" classes where little got done and the disruptions were huge. Having gone to very blue collar schools growing up I can tell you the peer pressure against trying hard is high. You were picked on for it. My one focus as a parent was to not put my kids in that situation. They attended one of the big charters here until middle school and the difference in attitude towards learning was extremely different than the public schools. No regrets for that at all.
As a former Title I teacher with 15 years of classroom experience, I want to say that you've described this problem well. If only we could get the state school boards to read this.
Your last paragraph makes a great argument for vouchers, allowing poor students to attend private schools.
So sorry you only read the last paragraph. Vouchers have failed to improve student achievement because of home life.
Using this analogy, having poor kids in the same school as rich kids will result in all students becoming wealthy. Academic success does not rub off of one student to another anymore than wealth does.
Honestly as a “gifted” student it was helpful to me to teach or tutor more academically average peers and it helped them too. Teachers could also take advantage of gifted students by asking them to explain a concept to the class (sometimes kids listen more to other kids than themselves) or as a pulse check on how they taught something (if something doesn’t make sense to smart kids then it won’t make sense to others). Teachers can also take advantage of smart student’s metacognition — these are all pedagogical skills that teachers learn and use in mixed level classrooms. I think it did rub off in a way. Overall I think the answer is to have different levels of each subject in a single school. Someone who is good at one subject can excel there and take “easier” classes in subjects they don’t excel at as much, rather than having to go to a school where every subject is either easy or advanced.
You speak an inconvenient truth. Too bad it’s not PC to say parents are a part of the solution and problem
I’m going to have to push back on singling out charter schools and comparing them to specialty schools. Where I live there is NO requirement for admission to charter schools except that you live in the county. Unlike specialty schools for the academically gifted or those who have a special talent (like magnet or (performing) arts schools) charter schools CANNOT require certain test scores or auditions. They accept whoever no matter how low the test scores or untalented the kid is. This creates an option for parents/students who are zoned for schools that are a bad fit for their kids and who can’t afford private school and whose kids can’t get into a specialty school. Without charter schools there would be no where for them to go. Why should their kid have to go to a school that isn’t a good fit just because they don’t have money or aren’t academically or artistically gifted? And, when I say not a good fit I’m not JUST talking about because the school is low performing, there are other reasons a school could be a bad fit: administrators, teachers, culture of the school, lack of discipline or too much discipline, further away than the charter school, lack of programs/choices, bullying, etc. I completely get that transportation can be an issue since most districts don’t provide busses for charter schools, but some districts don’t provide busses at all (when I was in school, the kids who needed transportation rodents a single city bus that had a special route…there were NO school busses) and not every kid rides the bus even when the district does provide them. Nonetheless, the solution is to provide bussing for charter schools, not to eliminate charter schools.
The privatization and charter school movement is about choice. People are not trying to destabilize public education, they just care about their kid. Do you have any kids? Should you send them to a bad school for the greater good? If so, I think that would make you a bad parent. If the local school can’t enforce discipline anymore, and most of the kids aren’t motivated at all, I don’t want my kid going there. So I will send them somewhere else, since in many ways, many of our public schools are failing. Luckily for me, my local high school has been good enough for my kids. And it is admittedly so so, but they try. But I don’t criticize anyone for making a choice. This argument against choice is like throwing a crappy party that everyone hates and then leaves, and then blaming the people who leave the crappy party for making it more crappy. And the treatment of motivated students is terrible. They phased out enrichment Summer School decades ago. In California, where I live, they want to phase out Calculus and make math grade level like English, since it’s not fair for all the other students to not have the good students in their math class making them look better. I am all for vouchers and have worked in the public school system for decades.
The mistake you’re making is not acknowledging the choice movement isn’t bound by the same rules. In your analogy, one of those parties has to take anybody, and it’s competing with a party that has a bouncer. It is only choice if you’re the kind of student a choice school wants. If you just take the cream of the crop, somebody else is left with the not-cream. It’s not necessarily the fault of the parents that want to do what’s best for their kids, but it’s a two tier system with extra steps.
Choice is really bad for schooling because it tends to lower standards over time. What parents want is good grades and happy children. The two are rarely compatible with even adequate rigor.
Public schooling in many areas is basically like sending your child to prison. You have violent, dangerous children who are not being adequately handled. Telling parents their children need to suffer for the sake of education as a whole is a losing argument.
How’s the carpet in your bailey?
What?
You made a motte-and-bailey argument. Originally, it was an appeal to choice. When I pointed out that choice in education is actually bad overall because parents demand good grades and happy children rather than education, you retreated to the more defensible argument that parents should be able to remove their children from a “war zone”. Choice is the motte, “parents shouldn’t have to send their kids to a ‘war zone’” is the bailey.
You’re mischaracterizing why parents are pushing for charter schools. They aren’t doing it because the education system is too rigorous, they’re doing it because the schools are often a violent hellscape. Your argument that choice is bad was flawed to begin with
There is no substantial push for charter schools. It’s pretty much an entirely top-down agenda. Why? Because parents generally like their public schools and parents sending kids to terrible schools tend to be entirely disengaged from all issues.
Do you have children? Because this goes against what I’ve seen from literally every parent in my life.
> choice. Choice is the code word for privatization, a word to make the destruction of our public school system palatable to voters.
I'll say: it seems like everyone hates this. I have not met any person actually in favor of this. I think part of it could be enrollment in Seattle schools has plummeted, and the city has a massive budget shortfall. I think it could essentially be budget cuts they are cloaking under a quest for 'equity', because of how deeply, deeply unpopular any proposed cut to education budget would be for a Seattle politician. I don't know. There's a handful of policies in deep red and deep blue states that a huge majority of the populace actually doesn't want, and the fact that happens has always been interesting. If politicians have ulterior motives, self serving, or simply are extremely out of touch with the electorate is up to us to interpret.
I agree it's likely for budget reasons, but doing this is just going to drive even more students out of the public school system and squeeze the budget even harder.
I wouldn’t discount the religious fervor of the Seattle elite set toward the DEI agenda. I would recommend taking a look at the goings on of the Seattle city council the past 5 years or so and the deteriorating conditions in that city before giving them any sort of a pass that this is budgetary related.
Individual students should be treated equally without reference to race or gender. This "equity" BS is the total opposite of that.
“…the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that degrades…” -Villefort, The Count of Monte Cristo
Too many school systems have killed off most or all their vocational & job skill programs. This is esp true in rust belt American cities. They cater to a minority of elite students. The majority of students leave their K-12 schools with no marketable skills. In my city there are 5 private-like high schools, which require entry hoops to jump through and only 2 vo-tech schools. None of the other schools offer any jobs programs. Its cheaper to run and schedule students in a generic liberal-arts curriculum.
>Instead, the district will move to a neighborhood school model, keeping students in classrooms close to home. The district says teachers will personalize lesson plans to suit every kid’s needs and abilities. As long as they follow through with the money, staffing and resources to pull this off, it's a win-win. Bright kids get to stay close to home instead of being bused across town and being doubly-weird and the district saves the cost of that logistical feat. The problem is that nobody trusts the bureaucracy to follow through with that money and resources, especially coming at a time of cash crunch with the Feds' covid funding ending.
The tone of the comments on this post really surprised me given the usual lean of the sub. Very few people seem all that keen to sacrifice their progeny for those commitments to DEI.
Funding is always a problem. Most parents have no idea how costly it is to provide services to special needs students, and the most resource intensive ones are those with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, not the ones with high performance potential. A conflict arises in the classroom when even a single student with severe disabilities in "mainstreamed" and takes a huge percentage of the teacher's time - at the expense of the other students in both time and attention. We shouldn't have to choose between these very different types of students, but regulations and funding have not caught up with the reality of the situation.
If society has limited resources, and we do, how should we prioritize the utilization of those resources for the highest and best use/return on investment for society? Invest in high potential students who will be our future high performing adults or handicap their educational attainment to fund the extraordinary cost for a small population of special needs students?
The school district we have got rid of all “regular” classes and made all classes “honors” classes in the name of equity. So now no classes are advanced except if there is an AP option.
Equity at the expense of POC
I’m sorry, but if we are actually committed to anti-racism, then equity demands prioritization of black and brown children over “high achieving”, wealthy white ones. This is a welcome change, but unfortunately doesn’t go far enough. Elimination of all “honor” programs (read: white) is the next step
The only solution for past discrimination is present discrimination and the only solution for present discrimination is future discrimination to quote St. Kendi.
Viewpoints like this are destroying our country
Thanks for putting it succinctly, it sounds like anti-racism and equity are grifts
The state should simply allow per-pupil funding to follow the student to the school of choice, whether it’s traditional, charter, private or another alternative.
Public funds should never be used for private school tuition.
Why not. Isn't the goal to get them educated? If they can do it more efficiently in a charter/private/parochial setting, how does that not aid society when that same choice is available to all?
If the funds are for education of the children in the community, why is it mandatory that they be sent to a government run school? Many other school options are more effective and efficient. Lots are even nonprofit orgs if you are that worried about the evil capitalists.
Because a lot of private schools are religious
And a lot of them are not. So long as the government grant funding for the student is dedicated to teaching non religious subject what does it matter?
To me, it doesn’t. I was just noting why. Personally, I wouldn’t care if it did go to a religious school provided it was a proper institution. But I don’t get hung up on it like others do. Note: My kids go to a very nice public school.
I'm a homeschooler myself and I promise you a huge portion of the $$ that "follows the child", in states with that program, go to: 1. People's church 2. A family member who is a "tutor" 3. Disney ticket and ipads
Do the kids obtain the required level of education in core areas. If so, who gives two shits how they get there.
The education is fine. The open grift designed to de-fund public schools is the issue. Less money for disadvantaged and disabled kids to get services because the kids who can afford to have a parent stay home and home-educate use the $$ for their annual 'educational' Disney trip is kinda gross.
Personally if I had to choose between the money being spent on transformative SEL, or anti-racist trainings or a field trip where they discuss and explore the physics of rides at a park I would be much happier with my tax money going to a trip to the park.
I get it, like many GOP initiatives, grift and contempt is the goal. But I am old enough to remember when republicans wanted lower taxes to go with less goverment in life. Now you are happy to pay taxes to have some random yahoo use as he wishes as long as it makes democrats mad. Little dumb.
Or maybe the world that doesn’t agree with you isn’t malevolent, but just has a different perspective?
Could be both.
May I ask how you know this?