From Freddie: The Basics: School Reform
Education discourse is caught in many contradictions and tensions, including
- Our education system is presumed to serve the essential function of sorting high school graduates into colleges and college graduates into jobs commensurate with their ability, but modern norms prevent us from acknowledging that for this system to work, there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution – that is, bad at school
- Education is purported to be a great equalizer even while it fulfills the aforementioned mission of sorting good students from bad, a central internal tension that results in endless controversies like those concerning the SAT
- Education research has profound and unique challenges in terms of basic research design and empirical principles, which I detail here
- Issues of schooling highlight the odd reality that many people have limitless compassion for children and will support all manner of programs to help them but lose all of that sympathy once someone turns 18, putting intense pressure on the system to promote social justice while they’re young
- Basic resource questions, like “Should the best teachers teach the best-performing students or the worst?,” go unanswered even in elite spaces that regularly debate education, largely because those questions are complex, uncomfortable, and politically unpalatable1
- In recent decades our school system has been purported to be the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality, tasks which schooling was never designed to accomplish.
I really liked this comment from Combaticus Wombaticus III:
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People avoid the question of “what do we want our schools to do?” because there will never ever be an agreement. Even in much more homogenous countries than the United States, there will not be an agreement on this.Report
A lack of an agreement is fine!
I’d like us to disagree about it.
That would be preferable to not talking about what is possible, what (sadly) is not possible, nor whether or not increasing funding would work this time.Report
The purpose of schools is to help my kid(s) and make her life better. Ideally that means “reach their potential”. I don’t understand why other parents refuse to own that answer, it’s clear and what a lot of us believe.
RE: there must be students who are at the bottom of the distribution – that is, bad at school
Not my kid. When I have had my kids start to fail at school and/or had the school system drop the ball, I’ve stepped in.
RE: “Should the best teachers teach the best-performing students or the worst?,”
They should teach my kid. If that’s a bad match then we do something else.
RE: promote social justice while they’re young
I’m not opposed but it’s not my problem so these efforts need to not get in the way of my kid.
RE: endless controversies like those concerning the SAT
The SAT is a messenger. Disliking the message doesn’t change the reality.
RE: the key mechanism through which society moves people out of poverty and promotes equality
Having parents who focus on their kids success is a massive advantage that the school system can’t equalize.Report
It’s a bit weird that so few people who give lectures on public education ever bother with its history.Report
What would bothering with its history make explicit that is obfuscated now?Report
For any given policy recommendation:
Is there currently a working model we can study?
Has this been tried before? What was the outcome and why is it not being done currently?Report
I’m pretty sure FdB wrote a book on this topic.Report
There are lots of models we can study from other developed democracies but they all have the problem of pissing off the entire political spectrum in the United States for one reason or another. Liberals aren’t going to like the massive amount of tracking in Europe or the STEM and route learning heavy systems in the Asian developed democracies. Conservatives aren’t going to like that the other system will not allow for heavy indoctrination in the way they want.Report
One issue with school reform in the United States at least is that nobody likes dealing with the changing demographics. There is a big Asian-American demographic with their own ideas about what a good education that go against what most Democrats or Republicans want the schools to be.Report
I think that what most people are really thinking about with education is less the education itself than the positive externalities associated with public, compulsory education. And when compared to a society where only a select few are literate and have more than the most rudimentary numeracy, the benefits are huge and indisputable.
The struggle now I think is what to do in a situation of diminishing returns, and where all of the low hanging fruit is picked. Should we be sparing no expense and effort on the lowest achievers? Should we be doubling and tripling down on the best of the best? Or do we accept that beyond a certain minimal level the whole thing is just daycare, and its up to those that want more to figure it out for themselves?
Not sure there’s an easy answer.Report
Freddie also references MY’s multi part series on the death of education reform. He never reaches a firm conclusion but I think Freddie is basically right, that the results just weren’t there. Charters proved a shell game, and no one was ever able to really diminish the teachers unions where they are powerful, to the extent that was part of the game plan.
In light of that failure we’ve had a progressive movement that seems to want to redefine success as whatever the outcomes happen to be and a conservative movement increasingly defecting from the project of public education altogether. Absent a real sea change my suspicion is that they will both win, probably to the detriment of us all.Report
One reason why Americans latched onto education reform for a long time was because it was a lot easier to raise tax money for education than it was for public health measures or other welfare state measures in American politics. This turned education into a sort of holy grail and panacea for American liberals. It isn’t though.Report
The scarcity premium thing was weird.
When I got into tech right around the mid-90s, there were articles coming out that talked about Solitaire training people how to use the mouse.
I got hired to my first job in tech because I knew how to type. (The fact that I had a Bachelor’s degree when only about a quarter of the country had one got me in the interview chair in the first place.)
Now? They won’t even look at kids with humanities degrees fresh outta college. All of the interns here have degrees in CompSci or Programming or something like that.
At least they know how to type, I guess.Report
The pendulum will swing back; I’m seeing an opening for those of us who’ve read widely in prompt engineering.
One project I’m working on my engineer told the LLM, ‘you are a marketing professional’ and a bunch of other stuff like, don’t lie, don’t add text after the name of the product, and so on… to help sell cookies.
Oh what an opportunity missed is all I could think. Imagine using the voice of a ‘marketing professional’ how droll.
You are Fafhrd describing to the Gray Mouser the finest cookie you’ve ever had; embellish with comparisons to local fauna, and after naming the cookie officially, give it a nickname that would tickle us with whimsey. Post to instagram.Report
One of my long time mentors had an entire federal career at the Corps of Engineers and EPA leading environmental analyses under NEPA because when he was hired in the 1970’s he had an English degree and could write well. What environmental chops he had back then were built on his lifelong pursuits of hunting and fishing as recreation.Report
I suspect that Americans might be too diverse in basically everything to come up with a working and uniform education system. You have conservatives that don’t want a system that will challenge traditional patriotism or religious feeling and traditional social beliefs. You have people who want a STEM heavy and pressure cooker system that don’t care about the humanities at all and want them regulated to the sidelines. You have different types of liberals and leftists who want a humanities heavy education that will teach kids to remedy the injustices of the American past. I don’t think there is anyway to square these various circles of wants and desires.Report
I think too many people suffer from too much romanticism over what school is and always has been.
That said I think it’s pretty clear that the public system has become too ossified. If it’s going to survive it’s going to need to get more flexible in terms of what it can offer and how it operates.
Right now I think we’re going in slow motion towards a worst case scenario. The best and brightest with the most involved families opt out to better options. A lot of cultural conservatives opt out to stupider and/or crazier options. Eventually the public schools become hollowed out husks where they babysit poor kids and maybe depending on the district throw in some progressive fairy tales.Report
I agree about the people suffering from too much romanticism.Report
Freddie makes a great deal of sense here. Most of our public education is OK, some of it is superb. We have significant problems in low-performing schools, which probably have little to do with whatever the reform of the week can address. But back in the day, we weren’t even trying. The low performers simply dropped out of the system or weren’t measured. I’d be surprised, though, if out and out illiteracy and innumeracy is noticeably more prevalent than it used to be. I’d be very interested in comparative information about how functional our current low performers are compared to the low performers from my or my parents’ generation.Report
One reason why there might be more emphasis on doing something for the low achievers is that it is much harder for people who drop out of school or are bad employees to piece together a living as adults in the 21st century for a variety of reasons.Report
Which is one of the reasons universal education was created in the first place.
Having a large mob of uneducated desperate young men with no prospects is a recipe for trouble.Report
I think this is exactly the issue. I also think trying to create a situation where low performers can have some minimally acceptable standard of living is a lot less quixotic than thinking we’re going to find some way to get the least academically successful doing calculus or reading at anything close to the same level as the best.Report
Answering both you and Chip. A big problem, as somebody on the other blog put it, people let their sense of morality interfere with reality. Liberals think we can turn all low achievers into high achievers or at least average students and conservatives think that people need the job and the answer is to apply disciplinary force against them. The actual truth is that there are always going to be people who are low achievers and bad employees for a variety of reasons and maybe paying them some sort UBI not to bother everybody else but go somewhere and play video games, have sex, or whatever would be a lot cheaper and more achievable than what the liberals or conservatives want.Report
Putting it another way-
Everyone wants to live in a clean shiny First World liberal democracy.
A place where the trains run, the sewers flow, electricity is always on and there is peace and freedom.
And during the lifetime of almost everyone living, this was something you could just take for granted as the default form of existence- that without some sort of external force, this sort of thing would just naturally blossom.
But it isn’t and never was. Even a brief cursory glance at history shows that until the Progressive era of the early 20th century, until the labor union organizing era, until the New Deal, until the Civil Rights battles of the mid 20th century, America and most of Europe was what we today would call a “sh!thole country”;
Even in the big cities, sewage often backed up or ran in the streets, there were teeming filthy slums where criminal gangs marauded with impunity because the government was open for bribes. In the rural areas, vast areas were without electricity or reliable infrastructure and poverty was widespread.
These things didn’t just disappear because of happy accidents of invention; Its not like someone invented gravity and sewage just started flowing down to the ocean and out to sea.
They disappeared due to the hard work of assembling governing coalitions of people who were willing to tax themselves to pay for infrastructure, tax themselves to pay for universal education, and do all these things even when there wasn’t an immediate benefit to themselves.
First World liberal democracy is sort of the Marshmallow Test on a national scale.Report
If we agree that these low performers are never going to be high or even middle performers, maybe we could reallocate some of that funding from turning them into high performers into something that isn’t destined for failure.Report
Would this require making the outcome of being a less-than-high performer palatable instead of catastrophic?
In other words, the job prospects of low performers would need to be relative pleasant in order to sell this idea, don’t you think?Report
Pleasant compared to what?
Current outcomes or the imagined outcome from when the programs were set up in the first place?Report
Pleasant enough to where a majority of people think, “Yeah this works.”Report
I think we’re in “equality” territory there, and that’s not going to happen.
Big picture I suspect we’ve long reached diminishing returns on all this. You get the educational result that your parents and culture want.
If they aren’t willing to step up to advocate for you, then you’re at risk. Success isn’t impossible but it takes a lot of effort from the kid himself.Report
Do you think that the “Equity” people will accept anything less than “Equity”?
Because, from where I sit, anything less than college prep for these perennial low performers is likely to be seen as giving up on the very idea that everybody is entitled to live in Lake Wobegone.Report
The most effective way to defeat the equity people would be to develop a cross partisan consensus that the state nevertheless has a role in making sure those worst performers still have things like health insurance. And yet there’s another side of this debate that is hell bent on making sure the equity people always have at least a little bit of a point.Report
The places that are currently scoring a complete and total gooseegg on the number of proficient students don’t have the other side of the debate going on.
It’s 100% the equity people.
Increase the funding!Report
Yea but the way the welfare state works in this country is through federal subsidy and at levels of government where it is a live issue.
To put my cards on the table I don’t really care if the kids at the goose egg schools match the kids in my county in trigonometry. That’s never happening for too many reasons to count. I do care though that we are able to say we gave them something like a fair shot at self sufficiency in adulthood.Report
To do that, we’re going to have to hammer out how much trigonometry we’re going to try to teach?
Just the 90/45/45 stuff? Add the 30/60/90 stuff?
Or do you see the fundamental assumption that I’m making there that pretty much means that we’re not getting off the ground in the first place?Report
Not sure if this is responsive but I see looking at the issue as a matter of educational performance as a combination of red herring and confusion of cause and effect.Report
Both you and Jaybird are ignoring the question in favor of an argument against your favorite villains.
My question was, if you want to create some sort of Tracking concept where some portion of students are not college bound, and sell this to the electorate, wouldn’t the job prospects for these kids need to be acceptable to enough people to get it going?
To be more blunt: If you want a German style tracking system you will need a German style blue collar economy.Report
That’s exactly what I thought I was getting at. I’m not interested in various achievement gaps. I’m interested in whether a minimally acceptable quality of life is being given to people that for whatever number of reasons don’t do well at academics. The interest in the academic gaps only exist because they are a proxy for other successes in life, and the gaps arise from the basic circumstances around the human condition, nature nurture, whatever. Hence the academics conversation being both red herring and mistake of cause and effect.Report
Maybe instead of figuring out how much trigonometry to teach, we get them up to where the question of how much trigonometry to teach makes sense, then teach it all and the different students learn what they learn? Most of us can live a fulfilling life having forgotten almost everything we once knew — however much or little that was — about trigonometry, so not learning as much as some classmates shouldn’t be much of a setback or source of shame.Report
If you don’t learn to like math/logic and be good at it, then it’s hard to see how you become an Engineer / Accountant / Programmer later.Report
And those are rather different sorts of math.Report
Very true, but in 10th grade I didn’t know which one I’d need. Worse, this is foundational, learning how to think.
The amount of math I need as a Software Engineer is very limited. However imho the type of thinking that learning math develops is a must have for the trade.Report
Yes on your second paragraph. When I was doing my undergraduate math/CS honors thesis defense* I spent 30 minutes on the unpleasant end of a whole set of questions after I made (what I thought was) a throw-away comment that the mental process of doing a proof and of finding a difficult bug in a piece of code were similar. In a traditional small high school, 10th grade is geometry, which is sort of an introduction to my throw-away assertion. I’d like to think there’s something better than Euclid today, but that’s one of Freddie’s research questions.
* The whole undergraduate honors thing was new for both departments, and I had to have profs from both departments on the panel, so they decided that — at least for me — it should be a somewhat dumbed-down dissertation defense. It was supposed to be 60 minutes; they had me chasing down assorted tangential rabbit holes for almost three hours.Report
Hard? Hell, it’s impossible. And you can say similar things about how you can’t qualify for certain other occupations if you don’t like or aren’t good at certain other subjects. But can we make all but the very worst students functionally literate and numerate enough to get by in common life? And how far away are we now from that?Report
Or machinist, HVAC installer, groundskeeper, framing carpenter, or 3d rapid prototyper. Just to expand a few steps.Report
If you want a German style tracking system you will need a German style blue collar economy.
Quick! Import more low-cost labor and offshore more manufacturing!Report
I’m totally fine with driving up the cost of labor.
Remember what i said about how overtime conservatives try to explain their policies they steer into a ditch?Report
Here’s a counter-offer for ya: The Status Quo.Report
And that’s why conservatives like Trump, Abbot & DeSantis can’t govern.
Once you get past all the blather, there’s really just nothing there but red faced shouting and arm waving, and in the end, its just…the status quo.Report
Chip, you’re the one saying that we shouldn’t change how the 0% schools are doing a dang thing unless we change the economy.
I’m the one saying we should.
If you insist on changing the economy first, you’ll get a next year like this year. Maybe a little worse.
Only one of us wants to change that *BEFORE* we change the economy.Report
This was your idea, to install a tracking system, remember?
I didn’t say it, you did. Your words. Your idea.
Then when I pointed out that no one will buy into it for the obvious reason that in our economy such a thing carries unacceptable outcomes, you retreat to arm waving and “Immigrants Arrgh!”
This is contemporary American conservatism, writ large.
Conservatives really have no idea, none whatsoever, what to do to do about schools. Or health care. Or climate change. Or crime, or the economy or homelessness or really any problem that requires governance.
They toss out the “concept of a plan”, but then upon first contact with reality, it collapses and they retreat to “Immigrants, Arghhh! DEI blah blah! Pregnant people scree!”Report
This was your idea, to install a tracking system, remember?
We already have tracking systems.
High level High schools don’t put the serious students in the same calculus class as the “failed pre-calc and not interested in learning” students.
The problem comes from low functioning schools where the non-serious students are a majority of the class.
Doubling down on tracking systems and being open and honest about their current existence would just be taking advantage of what works.
Conservatives have no idea… what to do to do about schools.
You have ideas in front of you, i.e. tracking. There is also school choice, which for all the talk on how it can’t work has worked for me personally.
“Can’t work” seems to be short hand for “unions don’t like them and some kids get left behind in theory”. The Liberal solution seems to be “give more money to unions and pretend there is a solution”.
Conservatives have no idea… what to do to do about health care.
Make HC providers advertise on price and have only one for that service. I.e. fix the system so we have markets.
Conservatives have no idea… what to do to do about climate change.
Nuclear power.
Conservatives have no idea… what to do to do about crime.
Jails. End the war on drugs.
Conservatives have no idea… what to do to do about homelessness.
Remove NIMBY’s ability to prevent the creation of housing.Report
Once again, this is barstool politics – simplistic answers to complex problems, which aren’t very well thought out and more importantly, have not been successfully implemented at scale, anywhere.
There exists no place where school choice has resulted in universal literacy; Even in places like Texas where conservatives have been in power for a century, problem students fare no better than they do in Baltimore;
As for the rest, just point us to a working model somewhere, or admit this is all just dorm room theorizing.Report
Chip: There exists no place where school choice has resulted in universal literacy;
And there you go. The bar for “success” is raised impossibly high when you have no idea how to pass that bar either.
School choice would make things better for individuals. Like tracking it would also encourage people interested in their children’s success to NOT flee districts that start to fail or just when it fails their kid.
We’d still have the usual things which move us to universal literacy, including mandating school.
Chip: As for the rest, just point us to a working model somewhere,
RE: Global Warming
Various countries have implemented nuclear power at scale, including our own.
France currently gets about 70% of their energy from it. The big difference in France is they designed one plant and then used that design for all the others rather than make each of them a one off.
It doesn’t deal with cars but just removing coal plants from the power grid would be a massively good thing.
RE: Health Care
Lasik/Plastic Surgeries are examples and
We have lots of examples of how markets work in general.
RE: Homelessness
We’re supposed to think that our massive political restrictions on the creation of housing have nothing to do with not having housing? Seriously?
Like with some of the other suggestions, this is not a one size fits all solution for everyone in all situations, but it is a step in the right direction. For some of these issues it would be a massive step.Report
In this case, it was my idea to say “we’re failing so catastrophically that it’s obvious that we need to do something other than what we’re doing”.
And you leapt to “well, to do that, we’ll have to change the economy first!”
And we’re not going to change the economy first.
MORE FUNDING!Report
So if we can’t change the economy, why do you suggest something that requires changing the economy in order to be acceptable?
Your options at this point are:
1. Tracking can be accepted and implemented without changing the economy;
2. Tracking can be implemented without the acceptance of the people;
3. OK, this was not a well thought out idea and I need to workshop it some more;
4. Immigrants ARRGH!Report
I am talking about schools that don’t have a *SINGLE* proficient reader. Schools where every single student is innumerate.
I am saying that the schools are failing and we need to change what we’re doing pretty radically.
And your response was that we needed to improve their job prospects.
I submit: Teaching these children to read will improve their job prospects. Teaching them math will improve their job prospects.
Continuing to do what we are doing will make them unhireable.Report
So you’re talking about instituting a tracking system, but ONLY for failing schools?
And how does tracking improve reading skills?
Is this a thought out idea that exists somewhere, or are you spitballing, like, “we must do something, this is something, so we must do this”?Report
We aren’t even talking about tracking yet.
We’re trying to establish whether we should change something.
Lemme guess… increase the funding?Report
So you aren’t even proposing anything? You’re even retreating from the “concept of a plan” you started with?
You are just doing exactly what I said conservatives always do, start out waving arms and screaming about the need for change, then when given the chance to give us their ideas, suddenly retreat to, “Well, we need to change something! Funding ARRGH! Immigrants GRRR!”Report
I’m going from the AA playbook.
“First you have to admit you have a problem.”
If I can’t get you to agree that we have a problem, it’s pretty useless to jump to your wishlist that you bring up for everything from climate change to inflation.
Hey! You want to get these kids to read more better? Legalize pot!Report
In one Texas school, 85% of high school seniors failed to meet graduation requirements.
We can’t talk about education until conservatives admit they are wrong.
No, don’t ask me for ideas.
We aren’t at that stage yet.
First, conservatives need to admit they are wrong, then we can start thinking about answers.
This game is as stupid as it is childish.Report
Chip, I would see 15% literacy and 15% numeracy as a step in the right direction.
“Maybe we should do in Chicago or Baltimore what they’re doing in Texas.”
Because we’re talking about schools that don’t have a SINGLE FREAKING KID MEETING SPEC. NO NOT EVEN ONE.Report
See you don’t even know what Texas is doing differently than Baltimore, or why there is a disparity of outcomes. You don’t really even know if they ARE doing anything differently.
For example, we know that plenty of schools in liberal states and cities are very successful, much better than some schools in conservative areas.
And vice versa!
You can’t explain why. All you can do is doggedly repeat the same line, except all in caps – “NOT ONE PROFICIENT BLEARGHH!”
And remember, this is after you spending years talking about the subject; After all this time and shouting, you (and conservatives generally) haven’t studied the problem, or thought about it, or created any ideas about it other than just doggedly say “NOT ONE PROFICIENT BLEARGHH!”
This is the same story on crime, climate, homelessness and all the rest, where conservatives can’t explain what their position is or why anyone should care.
Don’t listen to me, just listen to conservatives themselves.
When Trump, Abbot, or DeSantis give speeches, they never lay out their plan for prosperity, universal education, or solving homelessness- Its all just red faced all caps shouting “IMMIGRANTS BLARGH!”
This isn’t me saying it; Its them saying it.
Listen to them. Or read your own comments.Report
The north central part of the US settled relatively recently (as these things go) by Scandinavian immigrants. Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, down into northern Iowa and parts of Nebraska. High voter turnout and high academic achievement when the Democrats were winning; high voter turnout and high academic achievement when Republicans are winning.Report
Good genes.Report
Chip, I can’t even get you to admit that we have a problem when we have a school without a single freakin’ proficient student.
“But you’re not offering any solutions!”
“Because I can’t get you to admit that there’s a problem.”Report
The “because” doesn’t work here. You’re perfectly free to offer solutions whether Chip explicitly says bad schools are a problem or simply assumes it.Report
I’ve offered them before. Multiple times in multiple threads.
I’m now rehashing the whole issue of how a 15% proficiency rate is notable but a 0% proficiency rate is not.
Hey, CJ! Do you think that the growing number of schools with 0% proficient students is a problem?Report
I’m now rehashing the whole issue of how a 15% proficiency rate is notable but a 0% proficiency rate is not.
Why would anyone want to waste pixels on an “issue” like that? Or whether bad schools are a problem?Report
You’d think that it’d be an easy concession to make, rather than something to obfuscate against.
(Here’s my theory: If you admit it’s a failure, you have to admit that the people who were responsible for it failed. But if you don’t admit it’s a problem, you can avoid making that admission.)Report
I never said it wasn’t a problem.
I think having 0%, or even 15% proficient is a big problem.
Now with that out of the way, lets hear your suggestions.
I mean, you’ve had literally years to work them out. So they must be well and ready now.Report
Do you think that having 15% proficiency is markedly better than 0%?Report
Yes.
Are you ready to answer the question?Report
Sure.
“For starters, those schools in Chicago and Baltimore ought to change what they’re doing and switch to what Texas is doing.”Report
Do you (or any other conservative) know what that is?
No, you don’t know.
You guys have been howling about schools since before I was born, but after all this time, none of you have any idea of what to do differently.
Don’t believe me- just listen to conservatives, and they will tell you.
Project 2025 is very explicit that the only ideas they have for education are to reduce funding and give more power to censors and to discriminate against queer people.
That’s it! No change to pedagogy, no different teaching methods, no new ideas.
So I don’t blame you for being ignorant of what differentiates Texas schools from Maryland schools because conservatives themselves don’t know or care.
Which is what I said to begin with.Report
I don’t have to know what it is to say:
1) It’s not working over here at all.
2) It’s working better over there.
3) We should do what they’re doing over there over here.
I mean, if you want a long essay, I can link to Freddie’s in the original post, I guess…
But you can’t even admit that we should *CHANGE* something (ANYTHING!) about a system that is currently failing to produce a single proficient student in order to keep the status quo.
Increase the funding!Report
I’ve agreed, multiple times, that we need to change things.
You hide behind that to conceal the fact you (and conservatives generally) have nothing to offer.
You don’t know that Texas is even doing anything differently- there are a dozen other explanations for the different outcomes having nothing to do with teaching methods.
For all you know, the Baltimore school is doing exactly what Texas is doing, but the other factors produce a different outcome.
And again, I invite everyone here to witness this exchange and note how it mirrors the national discussion.
Conservatives spend years, literal decades wailing about schools then when confronted and asked for ideas, wave their arms to conceal the fact they just don’t know.
They don’t study education or think very much about it or how it can be improved.
How to ban books with queer characters?
Oh hell yeah, they spend lots of time on that.
Forcing taxpayers to fund private white flight academies?
Sure, they spend countless hours strategizing about that.
But actually thinking about education, about how to teach and how to improve the lives of people?
Nope. Nuthin.Report
Part of the problem is also that the Chicago and Baltimore schools *ARE ALSO FAILING*.
You want to look at complete and utter failure? Well, Liberals have spent years, literal decades, creating schools that don’t have A SINGLE PROFICIENT STUDENT.
Arguing against the boogeyman “conservatives” is what you’re forced to do because you can’t point to the success of “progressives”.
Their failure is what kicked off this discussion in the first place!Report
There isn’t a single state in the union that doesn’t have failing schools.
I can show you schools in liberal states that are far superior to schools in conservative states, and vice versa.
The driving variable of student success or failure isn’t liberal or conservative teaching pedagogy or curriculum because there isn’t one.
Failing schools and successful schools are often found in the same school district only a few miles from each other.
Its why I keep saying that the strongest and most explanatory variable of success or failure is the parental involvement and commitment to education.
So if you want to improve those Baltimore schools you should start with thinking about how to change that variable.
Or you could just continue to wave your arms and wail.Report
So, somehow, all of the parents who don’t give a crap about their own children ended up in the same school districts? Just magically?
Not *ONE* of the parents of the kids in these schools gives a crap about their children?
That’s quite an indictment.Report
It’s not enough to give a crap, you have to know what to do and have the wherewithal to do it. It’s far from magical that certain districts don’t have such people. But you probably know that.Report
There are these sorts of outcomes in every school district in every state.
Dark Matter has observed them, so has everyone reading this comment.
It isn’t even a matter of giving a crap, its a matter of being effective as a teacher of one’s children.
Some parents are grappling with personal issues, job issues, relationship issue, whatever, but the end result is that they aren’t able to provide an environment where children can succeed in school.
And this isn’t even Chip’s observation- The idea that some families have the capability to succeed while others don’t is the foundation of school choice.
Again, don’t ask me, ask them. They’ll tell you the same thing.Report
The idea that some families have the capability to succeed while others don’t is the foundation of school choice.
Sounds like it’s a solid foundation.
Especially if it’s possible for communities to have areas where there is not a single family capable of making a single child capable of being literate and numerate.Report
I’ll take that as a retraction of your recommendation that Maryland “do what Texas does”.Report
Well, if we agree that we’re in a place where some families do not have the capability to succeed, I think that the difference between states has suddenly been back-burnered.
What is to be done about families that do not have the capability to raise a literate, numerate child?Report
Liberals have an answer for that;
A combination of aggressive and well funded support services.
What do conservatives want to do about those families?Report
Ah, yeah. “Increase the funding”.
Maybe if we increase it a little more, we’ll turn them into functional parents.Report
What do conservatives want to do about those families?Report
A combination of aggressive and well funded support services, of course.Report
Your retreat to sarcasm is well advised, since obviously you don’t want me bringing the receipts of what conservatives actually say they want to do.
So I’ll just go back to what I said at the outset, that conservatives start by screaming about problem, then when given the chance to impress us with their brilliant ideas, suddenly fall when they realize no one wants what they have to offer.Report
If you want to build support for your proposals then I suggest rolling them out at a small scale and see how much they cost in the real world if there is a way to make them cheaper.
Ideally you’ll be proven right that they’re cheaper than paying for jails and I’ll be wrong that we need 5 adults per child to make some of these approaches work.
I’d be surprised if Gates hasn’t attempted it. Not hearing about social experiments suggests they’re either scary expensive or simply don’t work.Report
Some want the support services defunded, of course.Report
Chip: A combination of aggressive and well funded support services.
There are serious people who claim these services are a big part of how we got here.
…Johnson’s Great Society policies led to the dismantling of the Black nuclear family.[68][69] The result of strikingly higher rates of single motherhood has led to lower outcomes in Black children across the board.[70][71]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society#Legacy
The various relatives I’ve had who have openly told me they were pregnant but not getting married because of these policies is also suggestive.
This is the definition of “moral hazard”.Report
“Liberals have an answer for that;
A combination of aggressive and well funded support services.
What do conservatives want to do about those families?”
A combination of aggressive and well-funded support services provided by private charities, typically religion-inspired or religion-adjacent (when not outright religious missions), that are unwilling to turn away volunteers or donors who have TRUMP bumper stickers or who make snide comments about “culture” when fixing someone’s toilet.Report
Probably worth mentioning that Maryland is regularly rated towards the high end on public education, often cracking top 10 depending on the list. The states that tend to outrank it are also blue or purple, not red, and I’ve never seen a reputable source that puts Texas ahead.
I’ll never defend Baltimore City governance but the standards are mostly set at the state level. I get into similar debates in the other direction when we talk about gun laws. No one ever gets shot in my neighborhood but people do constantly in Baltimore despite having the same rules, which again, are mostly at the state level. Similarly the vast majority of children do well and many exceedingly so in Maryland public schools. Unfortunately the problem has a lot more to do with the people than the curriculum.Report
Now with that out of the way, lets hear your suggestions.
A lot of this comes down to “how do we fight poverty and the dysfunctional culture creating/resulting from it”.
Full Scale social engineering solutions that might work would also be deep into “we shouldn’t trust the gov to do this”.
Give judges the ability and mandate to take children from dysfunctional homes (which is often going to be poor homes) and put them into orphanages or functional relatives. In addition to other problems, this will look racist as hell.
A less heinous solution would be mandatory birth control implants on young teenage females, with it being reversed on request of both prospective parents. So every kid will at least start with two parents having responsibility for them.
This fails your rule of “fix everyone who is alive right now” and also has other issues, including again looking really racist.
If we’re not going to do that then we’re stuck fighting various symptoms of poverty. Try to deal with children constantly exposed to violence by getting a lot more serious about arresting and imprisoning the young thugs creating it.
End the war on drugs. Encourage school tracking even more than we do now, i.e. remove disruptive children from the classroom. Encourage school choice so interested and/or functional parents have the ability to do something other than flee.
Get really serious about getting rid of school corruption (i.e. adults behaving badly) so school money actually makes it to the classroom. That includes giving the principal the ability to hire and fire people without the union creating problems.
I’ve seen charters do well with elementary age kids with one teacher per ten students rather than one per 20 or 30. They pay for that by not having gym or busing.
If you want to really break the budget then we need four or five adults per disruptive child but while that’s the Hawaii program in a nutshell I don’t see how to pay for that.
One of the massive problems in all this is the total lack of cooperation from my personal clan. In theory you break up that 0% school and put one disruptive kid in every classroom over a very large area.
Thing is what’s good for that kid is going to come at the cost of my kid having to deal with it and there will be serious push back.
I’m sure I’m missing some others, get rid of lead pipes, etc.Report
The problem between determining what to do and what not to do is that all the solutions are very expensive, many are draconian and even racist as hell, and there is always going to be a lot tension between the bust heads crowd and the gentle people.Report
Would you rather have:
1) A non-racist system that educates X% of students.
2) A racist system that educates X%+20% of students.
This is a tough question!Report
Add to that list the problem that many of these solutions might be worse than the problem and they’re also normally not needed.
It’s the whole “my zip code has a zero percent murder rate, why do we need gun control” problem.
These are massively ugly ideas and mostly they’re not needed in my zip code. Ergo it’s less risky for me if the gov simply doesn’t have these tools.
Having said all that, I’m taking an engineering approach to cultural problems… so maybe someone else has better ideas on how to reform (destroy) a dysfunctional culture.Report
Trig is a horrible example. Students headed to college (and STEM in particular) need radians, sine and cosine as functions, identities, etc. Your “discrete” trig might be useful to people in some non-college areas, eg, understanding a dividing head on a lathe or milling machine. Most people aren’t ever going to need either sort of trig.
Math has lots of this sort of problem. There’s STEM math, there’s business math, there’s shop math…Report
Given that we’re talking about student bodies that have 0% proficient students, Trig is as awful an example as we could have come up with.
Might as well discuss whether it’s more important for the 0% proficient in reading students to benefit from the themes in Moby Dick or the themes in Wuthering Heights.Report
I’ve bitten my tongue on the reading subject, as my personal belief is the way to succeed is for the parents to read to the kids when they’re small, then read with them when they’re older, and always have a pile of age-appropriate interesting stories laying around the house.
This is time-consuming for the parents, and I don’t think there’s any way to duplicate it in a classroom.
Harry Potter addicted both my son, and now my granddaughters, to reading. There’s lots of things to talk about with kids in the Harry Potter books.Report
I don’t think there’s any way to duplicate it in a classroom.
If that’s true, then…
Well, if that’s true, then equity will only be found by hobbling the kids whose parents do have books lying around and read to them.Report
This is time-consuming for the parents,
Yep. All of my daughters had me read “10 Apples on top” until they could read it. I seriously emoted to make it interesting.
We also did random Aesop’s fables which were more educational imho.
When they got older they did some vapid Vampire Romance which was effectively Potter… although they did Potter too.
The older girls were somewhat flabbergasted that the younger girls got the same treatment and the same emoting with the same book.Report
To be clear, I used trigonometry as an example to be ironic.Report
I think your first paragraph assumes facts not in evidence.Report
We have solutions for how to make low achievers functional. At scale those solutions break the budget and/or are not workable for other reasons.
Thus the constant hunt for a more workable (i.e. cheaper) solutions.Report
Very eloquently stated, Chip. Thank you. (referring to 10/10, 8:26 am).Report
I am re-reading Ada Ferrer’s Cuba: An American History. One of the things that she points out is that during the American occupation of Cuba after the Spanish-American War, 25% of the occupation budget was spent on education and that the Americans really did seem to believe that this was necessary for self-government. Maybe education being the magic bullet is just one of those things that is part of liberal democracy despite not being exactly true because of the mythology of liberal democracy.Report
“universal literacy” is one of those social technologies like “clean reliable drinking water”, something so incredibly transformative to public welfare that we don’t even imagine it as something you have to do, it’s just considered a basic aspect of human existence now. Like, why would you not set things up so that every kid got taught how to read?
The issue is that now everything thinks that any meaningful change has to be on that scale. “We’ve made an improvement of 1/10th of 1 percent in the rate of occurrence” might be a genuine achievement but it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to lead to visible results in a single human’s lifetime…Report
We already have “universal literacy” for people who don’t insist on making bad cultural choices and inflicting those choices on their kids.
We’re insisting both that they be allowed to make those choices and also that there be no impact on their kids.Report
how is this a useful reply to anything either I or Lee wroteReport
It at least points to how “failing schools” is like crime, where only a tiny percentage of schools fail the same way that only a tiny percentage of families fail, or individuals fail.
Any useful idea of governance understands this and addresses it.
The vast majority of the police budget, court budget, penal system budget is spent on the small percentage of criminals and failed relationships.
The way that the vast majority of health care is spent on sick people.
The failing students and families Jaybird is talking about will always consume resources far in excess of what Dark Matter’s kids consume.
Healthy societies with mature responsible citizens grasp this and accept it as the normal state of things.
We have provisions established to handle businesses that fail, marriages that fail, individuals who fail, and students whose families just don’t stress education and who fail as a result.Report
Chip, what is your wish list of educational solutions? I guess that should be “within some reasonable budget”.Report
If we proceed from the idea that educational outcomes are driven by families and not schools then we need to stop talking about schools and start talking about families.
And like crime, we need to acknowledge that the vast majority of families are actually successful.
The problem areas, like that one school in Baltimore, are isolated pockets.
And we need to accept the idea that we are going to need to spend money and resources even to get to a minimally acceptable outcome.
Your list of aggressive and assertive government intervention into family life isn’t categorically bad, but requires a fiath in government ability beyond what most voters are willing to tolerate right now.
But your ideas start with a solid premise- that those families in Baltimore are our problem too, and their welfare is our concern.
I think if we started a drumbeat of that sort of social solidarity, (As opposed to IGMFU) we would have a much easier time tackling the problem.Report
if we started a drumbeat of that sort of social solidarity, (As opposed to IGMFU) we would have a much easier time tackling the problem.
Maybe.
There’s a lot of moral risk from rewarding/encouraging dysfunctional behavior(s).
That’s everything from political corruption to paying people to have children outside of marriage.Report
In what way is my comment about solidarity related to moral hazard?Report
Yours was a high level comment. Turning that into “this is exactly what we do” low level ideas without also creating a ton of moral hazard will be a challenge.
“Solidarity” means “we all stand together unified”, however you are asking me to help fix dysfunctional behavior and families.
Getting other people to make good choices is amazingly hard. Sparing them from the consequences of bad choices quickly and easily becomes moral hazard.
When I ran into that sort of thing from my (ex)wife, I couldn’t get her to make better choices so the best I could do was remove myself from the situation and divorce her.
My ex is burning through her life savings to protect her worthless hoarded furniture. She’s talking about how little money she has. She has five properties to store her collection of junk.
The solution isn’t I pay for her to maintain 5 properties to protect her junk, it’s she gets rid of 4 of her properties, her junk collection, and uses her master’s degree to get a real job. She needs to change her behavior. I do not need to change mine, nor should I be funding her mistakes.
The problem with “solidarity” is there often is someone at fault, and they won’t change or accept responsibility for their actions.Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X4Z1lLUMfw&ab_channel=JohnLockwood
Time stamp: 4.22Report
From Spain’s “Ideal”:
Google’s translation follows:
Report
“Up until recently, a plurality of struggling students in American schools were white, and this has changed because of evolving American racial demographics, not an improvement in white student scores; it remains true that a very large portion of our struggling students are white, despite assumptions otherwise.”
Perhaps Baltimore isn’t the outlier it’s purported to be here on this site.Report
I think this comment (and the included Twitter link) is informative.
https://open.substack.com/pub/freddiedeboer/p/the-basics-school-reform?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=72006874Report
Baltimore is notable primarily because of the multiple schools without a single proficient student.Report
I never said Baltimore schools were great. I’m sure there are plenty of other cities with schools that are just as abysmal.
Anyway, Freddie isn’t quite as down on American public education as you seem to be. At least, that’s what I take from his piece.Report
I received public education! And my public education was great. I had great teachers, engaging subjects, and learned a lot. Sometimes I go back and still think about Winesburg, Ohio and Mister Richardson.
He was a good teacher. That was a good book.Report
Though, I’ll grant, Chicago has started having a few show up as well.
(For what it’s worth, I will agree that schools that only have 15% proficiency are also very bad off. But the schools that I’m talking about would see 15% proficiency as a great leap forward.)Report
Nationally, 18% of black 4th-graders and 15% of black eighth-graders scored at or above proficient in 2019. For math, it was 20% and 14%. Depressingly, these numbers are slightly lower than the percentage of students eligible for free lunch who scored at proficient or above.
It is worth noting that proficient isn’t the lowest level of basic competence. That’s “basic.” Only about 30-40% of students score proficient or better, depending on grade and subject.
Statistically, if you have a hundred nationally representative black students, or students eligible for free lunch, it’s very unlikely that zero will be proficient. It’s not clear that the problems at these Baltimore schools can be reduced to the characteristics of the students attending.Report
Part of my theory is that there’s a large amount of graft going on. You may remember the Catherine Pugh scandal back in 2019 and I’m pretty sure that there are people less stupid still getting away with skimming a little off the top.Report
It’s not about race, it’s about culture. When we rolled out the Great Society, we enabled (encouraged) single parent households. The benefits we handed out were aimed at the poor. At the time, Blacks were poorer because of racism and segregation.
The moral hazards we created caused more problems for them than for whites as a percentage of the population. However whites have always accounted for more in terms of raw numbers.
Blacks are more visible because it’s mostly an urban thing for them while for whites it’s more rural. The media is largely urban and ignores all things rural so poor rural whites are invisible.
This implies white dysfunction will be harder to deal with than black because many solutions/services are close to impossible in a spread out rural environment. Ergo part of the “solution” for them typically is convincing them to move to a more urban place where there are more jobs, opportunity, services, public transportation, etc.
Making bad choices is the gift that keeps giving.Report
This isn’t a new problem.
How to get everyone to make good life choices is a problem as old as civilization itself, and no one has every found a foolproof way to do it.
Mark Twain said the only way to reform a drunk was with a shotgun, and all through history there have been various tools, from workhouses to mental institutions to socialism to religion itself.
There was extensive coverage of the slums of big cities of the 19th century, which were rife with unwed motherhood, drunkeness, criminality and general squalor.
Which sort of suggests that human failure is a condition to be managed, not a problem to be solved. Which also shows that they can be improved.
The slums of modern day cities are much better than they used to be- the school Jaybird obsesses over is head and shoulders above the nonexistent schools a century and a half ago.
The one thing that history tells us is that ignoring problem people is the worst possible solution. For evidence just look around the world at the nations still using the 19th Century approach- those are all the Third World countries that everyone tries to flee.Report
“Managed Paternalism”.
the school Jaybird obsesses over is head and shoulders above the nonexistent schools a century and a half ago.
Is that our baseline? 1870?
Is it reasonable to compare to schools that actually had proficient students at any point in the 150 years between?Report
Sure- Compare that terrible school in Maryland with the excellent schools in Maryland and tell us your thoughts about why they’re different.Report
The amount of paternalism within the households of the students in the classroom.Report
Which brings us right back to the discussions about those 19th century slums.
What happened to them? Why did they largely reduce in size and severity?Report
Everybody capable of moving out moved out, leaving only people incapable of moving out.Report
BZZT.
Try again.
But the fact you think so validates my observation of conservatism.Report
Really? Because I’m pretty sure that we could do a compare/contrast between the people whose ancestors moved out of those zip codes and those who remain in those same zip codes as the generations prior.
Like, this strikes me as measurable.Report
Do it.Report
And if I can demonstrate significant demographic change using US Census numbers?
Like, I don’t want to link to the census data for the 21223 zip code for 1940 and compare to 1980 and compare to 2020 and have you say “BUT EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT!”
I mean, if we can get to “but everybody knows that” now, I don’t want to put links together for you that you won’t read and don’t care about in the first place.Report
You seem to think you are the first person to study this phenomenon.
Rather than dive into primary sources, should you first familiarize yourself with some of the vast amount of scholarship on the subject?
Or do you think we all will be impressed with 30 minutes of hasty Googling?Report
So why did you ask for evidence if we could have just gotten to “but everybody knows that” without it?
Why don’t you post *YOUR* preferred scholarship instead of asking me to post measurables that we both know exist and then getting pissy when I question whether you *REALLY* want what you asked for.Report
What is it, that “everybody knows”?
Do you disagree with it?Report
“I’m pretty sure that Chip doesn’t have any of that scholarship that he was talking about.”
“Everybody knows that.”Report
Then it should be trivially easy to show evidence of your claim.Report
And if I can demonstrate significant demographic change using US Census numbers?
Like, I don’t want to link to the census data for the 21223 zip code for 1940 and compare to 1980 and compare to 2020 and have you say “BUT EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT!”
I mean, if we can get to “but everybody knows that” now, I don’t want to put links together for you that you won’t read and don’t care about in the first place.
Because it seems like we’re back to you asking me for census numbers that we both already know exist so you can ignore them and talk about scholarship that you refuse to link to.Report
I notice you are trying very hard to ignore established history of the subject.Report
Given that you’re not providing it, I don’t have to ignore it.Report
I asked google this and their robot gave me a list of answers. Better policing. Better sanitation. More jobs.
“Clearance” i.e. going in and destroying all the existing housing to get rid of concentrated poverty. Of course this only works if we’re willing to build new housing which mostly we’re not at the moment.Report
We’re not “ignoring the problem”. We spend trillions of dollars a year on fighting poverty. By the standards of centuries past they’re successful. We also invest huge amounts of money in education.
Where we have failed is in creating equality. When we say “we want everyone to have an equal shot at success” we’re saying “we want gov programs to fully compensate for bad parenting”.
That’s unrealistic. The children of competent involved parents do better than the children of people who make bad choices.
We can, and should, and do, encourage people to leave various cultures (thus “moving” from my previous post) but the people who remain are self selected for making bad choices.
For those 0% schools… it’s unclear what we should do. I’d never put my kid in that situation, ergo every kid in those schools is selected for having parents who did put their kid there. We might be looking at a school where all of the parents make terrible choices.
School choice would help some kids flee and we’re in “lifeboat ethics” where everyone who gets out is a success. After that I’m not sure what’s needed. School breakfast? We already do free school lunches.Report
Reframing: Putting all of the children incapable of literacy/numeracy is not a problem.
In actual practice, it is a solution.
There probably aren’t enough children in these schools.Report
Let’s discuss what “encouraging them to leave various cultures” means and might look like.Report
“Ones in which one reads to one’s children and leaves books around for them to read.”Report
For urban, we could look to history and increase policing; break the log jam that prevents housing creation and then actually destroy some mass slums if we still have them.
For the rural, hmm… we want them to move to a city. I’d suggest gov jobs programs doing that but we already have 18 gov jobs programs and we’ve found the gov is terrible at this. Probably breaking the urban housing log jam would still be very helpful.
For everyone, we’ve tried to encourage marriage. That implies strongly linking benefits to marriage as opposed to lack-of-marriage.Report