The spreading GOP destruction of public education

Understood. My position all along is that ot should be income based just like other social programs. And this conversation is about the state I live in, Nothe Carolina.

 

Ok? And I am saying... And have said since my first post... That there is a common sense way to do this and neither side is really discussing that.

Perhaps we agree, but our leanings arent letting is see it.

 

Yeah, and they mostly went turtle/shell because the leadership made no decision.

Like I said (and I know its OT), he did good early imo, but he went too long and caved to his party.

 

That was sarcasm. Intended to highlight the silliness of holding up private school achievement as something useful to improving education. If the goal is for all schools to have high test scores like private schools do, and they have high test scores because they have wealthy students and families as inputs, then the obvious solution is to make sure all students and families are wealthy. Which is ridiculous.

Agreed.

Agreed. Which is why it is silly to praise private schools for having higher test scores. It isn't about the public/private status of the school, it is about the families who are sending their kids to the school.

60-80% of variation in student achievement is related to factors outside the school. Of the variation in student achievement related to factors inside of the school, over half of that is related to peer effects rather than anything the school is doing. Parents make all the difference in their children's education. Measureable teacher factors only account for 1-3% of student achievement. Student achievement has very little to do with the teacher.

Government can do some things to help fix the problem of deadbeat parents, but none of it looks like education policy, so we don't talk much about it when talking about schools. The biggest problem with American education is the breakdown of the American family and the attendant poverty that comes with that breakdown of the family.

And here we see that you didn't understand any of what you read. Private schools have better results, they don't produce better results. They have better results because they have better students and families as inputs. They don't outperform their demographics. Public schools with similar students and families as inputs get the same results. It isn't the public/private status of the school making the difference.

 

Huh? I asked for EVIDENCE. You didn’t find it, in fact the article you linked stated the exact same issue I pointed out. There is selection bias in the data when looking at private schools.

Again with the “perform better”. A definitive statement you are making as to the capabilities, but lacking in evidence. Is it a “simple fact” if we cannot support the hypothesis!?

Oh look, we’ve moved to the strawman phase of the argument. I’m not interested in forcing any kid into public school. Everyone always has and always will have the choice to send their kid to private school if they have the wealth to do it. It’s whether I think it’s a good idea to raid the coffers of one school system to prop up another. If public schools were overfunded it would be a different discussion, most are cash starved. If there were data of a special educational technique that led to better outcomes, actually “better performance” that would be another, but you’d have to get past the selection bias problem and show actual causality. Show me the data!

The govt should cut checks directly to people? Who’s the commie now? How much do you think each taxpayer contributes? I think it’s reasonable only to refund the incremental amount that student’s family put in via property taxes, and break it down into fixed vs. variable costs. When you realize that all people pay property taxes whether they have kids in school or not, and that there are fixed and variable costs involved to creating schools, the realistic amount that could be “refunded” might only be a few hundred dollars or low thousands per pupil depending on their property tax contribution (math quickly gets bad if 4 or 5 kids or more!).. If you’re talking about awarding “vouchers” of $5,000 or $10,000 per pupil - the issue is twofold, comrade. First you aren’t actually “refunding” their money like it’s a bank savings account, you are actually re-distributing someone else’s money. Secondly: you are depriving resources from what is likely an already cash starved public school system.

Certainly. There are plenty of private schools around. But why should the govt fund them? You just state they “perform better” as if thats incontrovertible fact. How many new students do you think can be subsidized before it impacts this so-called “better performance”??? What happens when it’s 100%?

Nor am i against private schools. Considering I have an affiliation to Catholic schools that would be an idiotic assumption. I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but I’d certainly recommend private school *if* you live in a bad area with bad schools. I’m just a realist as to what the outcome of vouchers are. 1st, you are potentially vouchering money to people who already send their kids to private school anyway. So you would be shifting resources out of public school, and getting literally zero societal benefit. The 2nd issue is you can’t just voucher 100% of students to an elite private school, because then it isn’t so “elite” anymore, now is it? It’s elite because of selection bias. So what ends up happening is you end up with a bunch of shady operators with their hands out looking for that voucher money. You get a shit ton of fly by night schools opening in strip malls. That’s how you end up with 41% closure rate and schools closing in the middle of the year! The poorest kids still can’t afford any of these supposedly “higher performing” schools anyway or would be more likely to fall prey to one of the “lesser” charter schools. So who benefits? Maybe, like a few % of upper middle class families would be the primary beneficiaries in that way if it pushed them across the line of an elite preparatory school.

I think voucher programs are best saved in areas with truly horrid public schools, like inner cities with massive issues. Trying experimental programs, and as they have successes, award them more public money and expand to more students. THAT makes sense. That’s potentially doing good. Just throwing vouchers out there into the wind at a state level is idiotic, and i suspect mostly just going to pay off cronies who want a slice of the for-profit education pie action or people who already have kids in private school who see it as a refundable tax credit.

 

It's always been a matter of attention seeking. Other than rare circumstances, I would not engage with Q, only speak at him. Attempt at dialogue has been a waste of time, but also fuels the crave for attention.

 

Perhaps, but you are viewing public education from a business perspective, which doesn't play.

 

more poo flinging. Commie? Totally out of line.

 

what would be the metric(s) you gauge success or failure in a public school ?

 

It's a good question. I am not a proponent of standardized testing, but the tests provide some indicator of knowledge. That part would be maybe 10% of the equation. People tend to lean on tests, because it's easy to point to as a form of evidence. The truth is, though, that testing only provides a minor indicator which in and of itself is not valid. The rest would be more qualitative factors of overall climate. Are the children happy and healthy? Is the campus safe for children physically and emotionally? Do they leave each grade level better-prepared for higher level learning? The biggest factor would be the quality of the teachers, but any metric of teacher quality is subject to the same problems as standardized tests of achievement. Here are other factors:

• Are students provided opportunities for critical thinking?
• How strong are the arts programs? Do the students have varied opportunities for art, music, dance, drama and also physical education?
• How well does the administration adapt to changing educational initiatives and meld learning to best suit the needs of the students?
• What is the campus climate among faculty and staff?

There's more, but I gotta run. To summarize, there is no metric that indicates educational success, as it's too complicated. This is why Finland, one of the greatest countries for education, does not rely heavily on standardized testing.

Thanks for the question.

 

appreciate the well thought out reply. Hard to start a process or refine a process if you don’t have a gauge for success or failure of the process. Maybe use Stephen covey and “ begin with the end in mind “. Then draft up a metric to measure progress to the defined end

 

I hear ya. We deserve reasonable indicators of educational success and those, at present, are ill-defined. I honestly don't know what the answer is wrt the development of a metric to measure progress, which is why I stated that schools cannot run like businesses. Numbers alone cannot tell the story, but there are transparent indicators of success in many cases. My field is music, which can be brutally transparent. Consistent excellence is readily observed (though not readily measured). Consistent suckiness, likewise, is evident to anyone with a semblance of an ear and one need not be a musician to hear when a school music group is either really great or really poor. You're right about beginning with the ends in mind. This is why many educational institutions employ Backward Design / UbD.
Understanding by Design

 

Standardized testing is a good benchmark for the individual to see where they are at vs. where they are supposed to be or relative to population.

But I’ve always thought it’s kind of worthless for schools to use it as a metric to compare how they are doing as educators. Maybe schools in the same district can use it to track progress over a period of time? Like if you have the same demographic makeup and see positive progress YOY or to peer schools that could be a meaningful indicator a particular school is “performing”. But more broadly it’s a dubious measure. You’d have to control for a bunch of other variables such as ESL kids or income demographics or even regional differences of educational attainment. You can’t just do a straight look at standardized tests without deeper analysis. A deep dive into it could probably pull out some ways to measure “performance”, but then you’d need to standardize THAT second level analysis to make it useful as a measurement tool as far as how to compare how one school truly performs vs another. Then everyone would have to agree to the subtleties. Good luck with that!

 

Public education is problematic, but I wouldn't go as far as the OP and blame it for the destruction of the GOP.

 

Standardized tests also allow for comparing class to class, school to school or State to state. Many folks don’t like this aspect. It is only one metric, but it can be important. Some places not having testing or changing the tests render the data less useful.

 

Well if we are comparing private schools that are allegedly for profit then don’t you think we should consider that as well?
Having the Gov back stop expenses certainly gives Public schools an edge with regards to operating funds.

 

LOL, in other words, those who live in inner city districts....you know....the BLUE districts...those parents should get the hand outs to send their kids to wherever. But if you live in BFE, North Carolina.....you know....those reddddd counties that voted 80% for Trump....sorry brother...you're on your own. We'll take your tax dollars, but we're going to dump the funds in areas our voters live. What? You thought we were going to re-invest those dollars back into you folks?? LOL. No, we're going to shift those tax dollars to blue voter districts and take our victory laps so that when November rolls around...... wait for it....... (drum roll)...

Gotta love the resident Democrat/Communist posters on this forum. Incapable of showing any semblance of humanity. Party over country. Every time.

 

Ignore has been my friend here.

 

It’s only political if your head is deep up the ass of politicians. Like 100% of the time, you can’t breathe anything else, and every thought you make is political partisan trash.

Since that is not me, I’ll explain easily what I was thinking. My take on that had literally nothing to do with partisan politics. I actually had in mind something like the failed school system in Detroit. Which in fact was a well publicized “experiment” with charter schools pushed by none other than that commie leftist Betsy Devos. When it’s a very large school system everyone agrees has basically collapsed, then you start looking at alternatives. Of course that Detroit Charter school experiment had mixed results and/or widely seen failed (which is why many thought Devos being Secretary of Ed and wanting to push that nationwide was lunacy). But I was just stating that’s a situation where I can see the public schools as genuinely so bad that you actually do need to get creative. I wouldn’t apply that logic to suburbia or to urban districts with fixable issues. Particularly as the charter school method is likely to both undermine them AND produce unspectacular (if not disastrous) results.

In terms of rural America. You are aware of the concept of population density? You think small towns need to have overlapping schools? You are aware many smaller towns have a single k-12 school and that’s it. They don’t even have a practical need for multiple buildings, let alone an array of charter school offerings to compete with their one public schoolhouse. I am not saying we should ignore rural areas at all, they should get full support, and poor rural areas should get exact same funding as anywhere else to make sure every student has exact same educational opportunity. Exact same grants to fix schools in disrepair as you might need to fix up cash strapped urban schools, etc. What they probably need least of all is “school choice” as the population doesn’t even exist to support it.

 

Why is public education problematic? Is it for other countries too?