The one place most people will experience or witness violence at least once in their life is in a school. No one mentions all the people who feel safe at home, but suffer abuse and ostracization or ignored by teachers at school.
"Socialization", its like arguing people need food and then giving them dog food.
Given most modern school schedules, lack of recess, and lunch breaks being barely enough time to eat, I heard even what socialization does take place is being diminished.
School isn't the only and definitely not the best option for socialization.
At least in home school, they mostly learn socialization by and with adults, excluding extracurricular activities and co-ops.
That will just splinter society further into divisive religious and other ideological tribes who can’t understand each other or even get along. We have some of this now but vouchers make it worse and drain the budgets of public schools. The money has to come from somewhere and it ends up coming from taxpayers. So then less taxpayer money is available to do actual helpful things.
With your vouchers, is any school required to take a voucher required to take a student?
What if the student has a learning disability? In a smaller school, that will certainly take down the test scores - will three LD students ruin the school's reputation? How about people with down syndrome, for example?
What if the student requires major accommodations - for example, the student is quadriplegic? The big school systems currently take money from all students to help out with these expensive cases.
Will these private schools with vouchers be required to maintain the same standards as the public schools? For example, can a school discriminate via race or religion?
Most voucher advocates are really looking to take the easy students and dump the hard cases on a backstop underfunded public system. Then everyone will look at the public system and say, "see how much better the private system is!"
Because the private system does not take the hard cases.
You have a lot of questions. Denmark has money tied to the child and not the school district. Look into their system for more answers.
Everything is a process of improvement overtime. The reality is, we don't have all the answers ever. What matter's is how much things are improving overtime. I don't see that with public schools.
I could easily ask you a ton of questions on how to fix Detroit or LA schools.
There was an interesting issue with the voucher system- most specifically, in areas with the voucher system, private schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. Ie. They are not tested the same for quality and they are not expected to have the same programs for special needs children.
Cherry picking data can certainly show that private and home schooled kids do better on tests. It's easy to self select and paint a great picture.
US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%. The US problem with schooling is more and more a problem of equity. People need to understand that helping other kids isn't going to hurt their kids.
US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers. I don't mean schools when I say education, I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need.
Wow, just kind of threw the kitchen sink in there didn't you. Many if not most of those go to middle class and higher families. Pretty thanks for providing the details so we can all see how disingenuous this argument is.
Private and home schooled kids consistently outperform public schools by a GIANT margin. The quality of education, by say a Montessori school, compared to public is drastically different; from building self esteem, independence, critical thinking, creativity, socialization, etc.
Public schools, are derived from the Prussian system, its optimized to create obedient workers, its the lowest common denominator in education.
Arguements of equality in public schools are out the window too when you compare the funding and quality between poor counties and wealthy ones.
Its especially unjust that parents paying for private education pay twice, for public and private.
It's really too bad that the only way we can be sure rich folk pay their fair share is to charge them twice for private education. Otherwise, my mother may not have felt it necessary to work the overnight shift at the local factory for decades in order to provide us with the basic necessities and a private school education.
We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.
This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.
Yes, like I said, private schools are not held to the same standards. They get to use public services like support for high functioning special needs students while claiming more profit off those programs. Additionally they get to pick and choose people who attend these schools- I noticed you only specified "high functioning" for those schools. A public school doesn't get to choose between "high functioning" special needs students and "low functioning" ones.
Perhaps an increased voucher for special needs students is in order.
Society is disadvantaged when intelligent students aren't allowed to achieve their fullest potential. We need programs that allow students to independently work at their own pace. We'd have a ton more 15-16 year old's attending college.
This still doesn't allay the issue that private and charter schools have the ability to simply decline to take up students that are more difficult for them to teach.
That there is room for improvement does not prove that a particular method would cause the desired improvement.
There is considerable reason to believe almost all variability in school performance is due to factors unrelated to the actual school itself (predominantly, the socioeconomic background and environment of the students and degree of parental involvement), which explains why limited scale efforts which require active parental choice to engage always perform better than the baseline, but scaling those up to be the baseline usually fails to have the same results. Better schools are just the schools attended by the students that would do best whatever school they were in.
So, if you aren't directing the solution at the things outside of schools that drive school outcomes, I don't expect you are going to solve any problem with the schools.
The inflexibility of the current system is an issue, at least the ability to try different schools/home school options allows people to try everything until they find what works, more so they can find a school that works best for their child.
Just like remote learning, if I don't like K12, I can try another online school, same as I dump Netflix for Hulu. I'm not even geographically limited. If there is a teacher that specializes in teaching dyslexic students and I have a child that's dyslexic, I'm no longer limited that the teacher isn't in a school within 5-10 miles. The teacher can be in another state even technically as long as she's board certified in my state. There is also a geographic arbitrage advantage, if my school system doesn't pay teachers enough to live comfortably in my city, maybe the teachers can be hired where its cheaper to live. Or teach for NYC and live in rural NY state.
We can postulate how a top down approach might work but these students will still be suffering while we sort and continually monitor (we won't) the system.
Involving market forces and allowing parents to have say in where their children will be educated puts the power in the most effective hands for change.
Denmark proves that vouchers are not incompatible, when combined with the other conditions which exist in Denmark, with good outcomes, but the other places that don't do it and also have good outcomes show that it is not necessary for good outcomes.
Good points. We just don't have that vacuum to test as gov's differ.
Market forces improve conditions. Motivations are realigned to the incentive of the parent's satisfaction with their kid's education. Service improves when you have competition.
Middle school was probably the only really violent time in my life. Several occasions I got the shit beaten thoroughly out of me and I was too scared to tell anyone about it because the fuckers threatened to just show up at my house or bus stop and beat me up even harder. I believed it. I often fantasized about bringing a gun to school and blowing them away, but knew I could never do it. It was fun to think about though as a kid.
Don't know whatever happened to those kids, but I hope they're in prison or dead, or just living shitty lives. I doubt they ever got better.
For me it was late middle, and first two years of high school. I actually had a guy wait in the hallways for me to pass by to terrorize me for one particular class. Another one I had to deal with on the bus when it got to be too much and I guess the bus driver observed enough of the constant abuse by this other kid that when the fight was over (I won), they didn't turn me in.
But I saw fights that were much worse, fights that ended in bleeding, cracked ribs and concussions, thankfully there was hospital across the road. This was in a rural region high school, in the 90s, I can only imagine what its like in places with actual gangs, today, etc.
The worse part about it is, you tell the teachers, they do nothing substantial, then you're a snitch. If you do the one thing likely to solve the problem, which is fight back, you're punished, and now the cops are called and you're likely arrested. Some kids eventually snap, and parents wonder why school shootings are a thing.
Don’t look them up. I remember hearing about someone who basically had their life thrown into crisis when they looked up their main bully and found out that he was rich, married to a beautiful woman, had three perfect-seeming children, etc.
A kid who is smiling and well behaved in a Facebook photo. Basically, the guy worked at a grocery store, was single, wasn’t an unhappy guy, but always thought karma had caught up to his bully. When he discovered that karma doesn’t exist it sent him into depression and rage.
I still remember my first fight, it was at school in 2d grade in Seattle. I was a new kid, a jerk jumped me right in class for touching his chair. Luckily it was harmless. I was not bullied after probably because I was not small or completely friendless even though I was shy and quiet.
The next time was in 5th grade in Texas (new kid again -- I was the weirdo from Seattle). Also harmless. We didn't even get suspended or put on detention in those days.
The next time was in the Army defending someone who was being bullied by a racist. That was scary for me because I was so angry I could have really hurt someone. Luckily, cooler heads intervened.
Growing up, I heard stories from cousins that went to public school in the Chicago area. Major fights everyday. Though they managed to stay out of harms way.
Back in Seattle, my son got suspended for play fighting in middle school (zero tolerance) but otherwise he made it out without getting into any fights -- it helped that he was/is very tall and a popular athlete.
Onetime when I picked him up after a dance there was a horrible fight where a large girl was beating the shit out of a smaller girl with 100s of kids whooping it up around them. Crazy time.
Plenty of more stories from his time in bad schools in South Seattle. Scenes out of a movie bad. Most people can't imagine the out-control violent environment that exists in some US public schools. Even in cities like Seattle.
I can't imagine how bad it could be for kids forced to go to bad schools in big cities like Baltimore, Philly, Chicago, LA, DC, and such.
"In Finland, where substantial physical activity is part of the school day, rates of ADHD are also very low. Meanwhile, in the U.S. children are asked to sit still for the majority of the day. Elementary school students often get only 15-20 minutes of recess a day, a far cry from the 60-90 minutes their parents had. Coincidentally, ADHD rates in the U.S. have gone up over the last 15 years. "
A common joke in the home-school community is: "I was worried my kid was missing out on the socialization of public schools, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money".
People have very anachronistic views of home schooling. A generation ago it was fair to believe to was mostly ultra religious people wanting to shelter their children. These days, a large chunk of it is people that have no faith in public schools to educate their children, and people who want to avoid political influences that are creeping into public schools.
My belief is that public schools are part of the foundation of a community.
If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them. And, I don't mean improving them for your child's specific sake, but overall.
And, if you're not, you're not really invested in your community.
Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in. My values prioritized equity, and yours may be different.
>Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in
I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion. Not everybody has the income to support living in a safe community, and for those who don't, private schools are the only option to ensure their child experiences a reasonable level of safety.
> I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion.
Not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd wager that, outside the USA, that's almost unheard of in the developed world .
I know that doesn't make a lick of difference to an American who is in that situation, but surely it's a reflection of American society and culture, not the concept of public schooling in general.
There is a lot of violence in public schools in developed countries outside of the US.
I went to a public school in Australia in a relatively wealthy area and saw multiple gang beatings. One guy beaten so badly that he was knocked out cold for over ten minutes with people jumping on his head.
I know for a fact it's worse in less wealthy areas.
Australian public schools don't have shootings but there is enough to fuck up kid's development. They always descend into honor culture violence. I'm speculating but I do wonder if it's significant part of the problem that poor Black communities in the US face. These young boys thrown into a pit in a status game where they have to prove themselves and become brutalized in the process.
One solution to that is private schools where the staff are accountable to paying customers who won't stand for this violence. Low tier bureaucrats who can't get fired in public schools just don't care or can't stop it.
There are exceptional public schools with no violence, often they're selective, but they're rare.
Maybe? Some criminals swap guns for knives in countries other than the US (though there's still plenty of criminals with guns too). The main difference is the culture though. Violent crimes are at least an order of magnitude less common in a lot of non-US countries. I'm all for gun laws but I don't think the weapon really changes the equation much.
Schools are the same. I don't think I've ever heard of someone being knifed in an Australian school. Even though theoretically anyone could do it. There's no security or anything, it just doesn't happen as often as in the US.
As an American, I think the tolerance for violence in American society is astonishingly high. I think that our high urban crime rates and our documented problems with police brutality are symptoms of the same disease. Certainly widespread gun ownership and latent racism are confounding factors, but I don't necessarily believe they're the driving force because they are a poor explanation for the violence we see in places like Baltimore and Chicago.
I've come to believe that there is something very wrong with our attitude towards violence, and yet it's not clear to me why we are different or how we got here, let alone what policy changes could address it.
It is and it isn't, it varies heavily on where you live. Most people never see or experience violence outside of schools. For all the talk on the news, I've never seen or met someone whose encountered violence lately.
It's certainly less common in Europe as well but not unheard of. I feel like we're slowly going towards the US, with the UK leading the way, but we're still quite far away.
Where is this level of brutal violence the expectation of public school? That sounds far more like an 80s movie.
At risk of oversharing and personalizing, we attend school in Brooklyn, at a school that prioritizes inclusion of non-native English speakers and kids on food assistance. A large percentage of our classroom's kids live in public housing. It's a safe room and building.
And, please don't kid yourself about private school buying your way out of the potential for traumatic experiences. Elite boarding schools don't have the best histories wrt sexual assault.
Raising good kids and protecting their mental health is contributing to the community. Throwing them to the wolves so they can become messed up is not.
Even if I accept this conclusion without questioning, not being invested in your community is perfectly OK. Some people are not particularly 'communal' by nature, some hold views very different from the local standard etc.
Imagine that you are a pacifist in a community that holds militaristic views and they seep into the local school system.
I would agree with most of that. I'm not a collectivist, and have no interest in sacrificing my children's well-being for collectivist goals. I will do everything in my power to give them an advantage in life, equity is explicitly not my goal.
Interestingly, people involved in homeschooling tend to be very involved in volunteering. I myself volunteer more hours than I care to think about. However, they tend to be involved in sub-communities, not the public community as a whole. Based entirely on anecdotal experience, I would bet that they do more for their own communities than the general public on average, it's just focused outside the public sphere.
> If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them.
You have little to no way to improve them. When the environment you live in is shit, the best way is to move, not to spend your life fighting to change your neighbors.
This kind of closed minded, judgemental stuff is why people don't even bother trying to explain themselves and do what's right for them be it private or home schools.
Yeah, that's actually a great argument, and no matter what school you're kid is going to be exposed to the personal crackpot values, politics, and theories of any teacher, the more likely a teacher is to share their personal values the more likely they're not something. They often forget their job is purely to deliver content based on the curriculum and there is a boundary there they need to respect. i generally respect teachers, but I don't trust someone who got a 4 year degree and certification to take an underpaying job making less than an average college educated salary, and often requiring a breadwining spouse to live comfortably, to think rationally about something including their value systems. Yes, they may have done it for other reasons, but that's still an indicator of making major life decisions on emotional thinking and further contributes to the issue of underpaid teachers (they're not going to pay you more if there are plenty of teachers willing to work for that salary). I'm dubious and sceptical of the kind of person who reads The Secret, or relates everything in life to Harry Potter, but says all religion is dumb.
I've had one teacher tell my sister my mom was awful and was cheating on her taxes in front of the entire class humiliating her because my single mother, didn't get my sister a SS card, which at the time you didn't need until you paid into SS.
You don't have to like every parent, but ultimately the child is their responsiblity, the values of a child are up to a parent to pass on. Not the teacher's or the government's role. Outside of something that is actually inflicting harm, and you can hate religion but its not the worst thing in and of itself and bad parents don't need religion to mess a kid up.
I am a teacher. Would you trust me more if you viewed my underpaid work as a charitable donation to the society in which I live?
Would you pay 60% marginal tax to see class sizes halved, salaries doubled, but maybe also remove any sense of public duty from the role?
(One more: would you like to see complete commercialization of eduction, with real salary competition driving up wages, but with the state rather than the parent picking up the bill. Compare this with college education, where student loan companies pick up the bill — you can see where I’m going with that analogy.)
Not the OP, but I would be happy with teachers earning twice as much IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. Unions will fight that with tooth and claw.
It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.
Ideally you'd let the kids choose, but their brains are unformed and probably bad on average at long term planning. So I will say parents choice - they are the people most likely to be making good decisions on the child's behalf.
Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.
It's extremely easy to detect bad teachers if you're a child or a parent (or another teacher). It's hard to detect bad teachers if you're a beurocrat looking at grade tables.
I had a chemistry teacher who loved the school athletes and was confrontational to the nerds. So the first set of parents thought she was great and the second didn’t.
I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
> I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.
Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case.
Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.
They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.
> Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.
This feels like an assumption to me.
My wife is a public school teacher. There has always been heavy collaboration between her and her colleagues, even more so now with remote learning. There are certainly unmotivated and lazy teachers and the other teachers know who they are.
Is the social contract that they are allowed to disagree with you, but you get to decide what their children think? I'd bet a dollar they didn't realise they signed up for that.
Parents are on average stupid. So are government officials. Centralising the power just means that when there is a bad official, everyone suffers. Just because the best alternative is still bad doesn't mean there is a great option here. All the choices have drawbacks.
I agree all choices have drawbacks. I'm merely pointing out that using parents to judge the quality of educators due to the political leanings of educators implies parents themselves aren't politically led. I don't know if an apolitical education is possible- how does one teach history or social studies?
That is a hard question, yes. There is no universal metric that would tell you that.
That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.
Parental review sounds like the perfect way to judge teachers. Parents are the most invested and least affected by nepotism within the institution. They're also way more likely to be concerned about the outcome for the kids.
In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me.
The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?
Least affected by nepotism within the institution, sure, but obviously affected by their relationship with their kids. Surely that would create a bias in favor of teachers who are likely to give students good grades?
If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.
That emotional passion for charity fades, it becomes another job, then you have burn out. Most professions that pay well, when the passion fades, you at least get paid enough to pursue other things in your free time to fill that lack of fulfilment.
The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally.
There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education".
Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.
All my best teachers, including college, had practiced in the field. Actually your scenario is exactly what I was thinking about doing in old age given my CS teacher was math teacher that had done punch cards once in college. By the end of the class, I knew the programming language better than she did and was the one going around helping students with debugging.
I think if teachers were paid more they would feel a stronger sense of public duty. I don't think being paid less makes people feel more duty to their work.
Then again, people who homeschool do like to paint the schools in worst way possible. They do like to think school is the worsets of the worst, even when it is not.
That is called having an opinion. It is not as if people homeschool for shits and giggles. Homeschooling costs a lot of time and energy, it would be easier not to do it.
Yeah and that opinion is heavily motivated and not necessary fair assessment of school nor attempt to fairly asses the school. Whether by wish to feel that you do the right thing or by religion or politics or whatever.
The comment I responded to was literally about common joke in home schooling community that is literally that. It is not even opinion, it is exaggeration meant to paint the schools as much worst that they are. The schools have issues with bullying, it does exist. But, very realistically, "the socialization in schools consist of kids beating each other and stealing lunches" is over the top.
It is over the top, but worst experiences tend to overshadow the rest. If someone beats you, odds are you won't forget that humiliation for a long time. Ideally, people should not get beaten in school at all, much like we do not tolerate the same in a regular workplace.
Some schools manage to prevent that, good for them. Those that cannot or are unwilling to do so, will end up as bad examples in conversations.
Yes. But again, people who push for homeschooling were not all beaten not witnessed traumatic things. Quite often it is religious or political. Or living in group where it is normal.
Or sometimes having special needs kids - but these people don't need schools to be awful. They have that special need and tend to focus on that.
If we want to use the worst examples as the example to measure schooling by then I think the worst examples of home schooling should really be emphasized here. Wasn’t there a case recently where a white mother of adopted black children took and homeschooled her children after teachers tried to report possible abuse- and then the mother later went and killed her children and then herself? I believe that was the background to a popular image of a black child hugging a cop and looking into the camera with tears in his(the child’s) eyes.
I think you have causation backwards. Homeschooling is a huge burden on a family, people take that on because they have a low opinion of public schools, generally.
Every time school is mentioned on HN it is all how hell holes schools are. And how pandemic shown school is just about childcare (and childcare is bad thing).
Meanwhile, back here in real world, my kids were super happy to return back to school. Their friends were super happy to return back to school. They look forward friends and they also prefer learning in school over learning at home.
Meanwhile, I as parent found out that school teaches kids better then I did, that the lessons were about more then I realized when looking at them.
And it is not like our local school was super top heavily praised one. It is one of those ordinary average ones in system that objectively struggles.
HN demographics lean pretty heavily towards the lower end of the school pecking order. See also pg's essay on the topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Yeah, but I work as programmer in company where almost all employees are programmers. Quite a few are also the "I am technically technical type who is passionate" kind of people. Based on discussions I have, they dont have such trauma from school. Except one they dont recall about being bullied and that one studied humanities and worked in mostly non-technical position originally. He also never claimed his issues stemmed from being too smart (I wont repeat his analysis of why here, but he thinks reasons were different).
To large extend, even that essay does not strike me as something describing people I know or my experience. But it strikes me as very populist writing targeted at those who identify as outsiders. Something written by person who was obsessed by popularity and social position himself quite a lot. In our school, kids with good grades were not unpopular or hated. Good results in programming or math or literary competition did not made you outsider. I never perceived such abilities as social liability.
There was something like "unpopular" kid in our class, someone who don't have many friends. Not that everyone was friend with everyone. And I think that guys did to one what would be called verbal bullying now in one period. But in neither case it was really not because he was smarter then everyone. And none of these ended up in tech work and none was interested in tech.
The very concept of 'popularity' is completely foreign to my experience. I don't think there was a thing such as a popular kid when I was at school or high school.
I personally enjoyed a lot going to school because I could spend time with my friends. I have never witnessed any violence apart from fights form time to time between two malse wanting to show who the strongest was. I was not in a privileged school.
Went to mostly private schools in America and my home country and none of them were anything like this. I've seen some violence back home but not physical. Alcohol, drugs, general bad behavior etc were a much bigger problem and definitely the worst at one public school I briefly went to.
In every school I'd say like people hung out with like people. So the "popularity" would be limited to that in-group. Most of people who PG would call "nerds" had a clique of their own as far as I could tell.
Some people might have been broadly disliked though.
it's not just a US specific thing, it's a generation specific thing.
The scenarios described in the GP link is a very late 70s-80s (Gen X) thing. 90s and early 00s high-schoolers had somewhat different experiences, but they know the trope since that's what was in movies. Schools today have a different concept of a "pecking order" - it's not that nerds aren't at the bottom anymore, it's that the whole concept changed.
That is your kids experience but it's demeaning to call it the "real world" given so many other kids have a completely different experience. My time in school was also hell on earth and I believe it did do some psychological damage.
People who have a mostly pleasant experience in school are unlikely to comment about it. I don't doubt some people had a god-awful experience, but you're hearing from the left tail of the distribution and not the hump.
