A thought experiment might contribute some clarity and perspective to the intensifying debate over whether parents have too much or too little choice when it comes to their kids’ education. In this thought experiment, parents wouldn’t have a choice at all—in one scenario, every child would have to attend private school, and in the other, every child would have to attend public school. Which scenario would be more likely to improve or worsen kids’ educational outcomes—and, by extension, the health of American society? Few believe that an entirely public- or private-school world is ideal, let alone feasible. But imagining a world in which K-12 education is either all private or all public could help clarify the current discussion on education policy....
March 5, 2018
"What If America Didn't Have Public Schools?"
Asks Julie Halpert in The Atlantic.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
138 comments:
Public schools are obviously a necessity, (my sister and I attended public schools and universities), however, the existence of private schools introduces the element of competition that politically and union controlled sorely need.
The option of requiring everyone to go to public school is barred by constitutional law.
A better thought experiment would be to ask what if America did not have teachers' unions.
The difference is curriculum diversity in private schools, which may aid in discernment of the progressive product in public schools that has exhibited a decadal drift.
Worth the effort,
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/04/paul-galvin/achieve-educational-freedom-excellence-and-harmony-eliminate-the-public-schools/
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/04/paul-galvin/strike-a-victory-for-federalism-eliminate-the-public-schools/
Public schools are obviously a necessity
Affordable, available, and competent education is a necessity. Schools, public or private, are one possible solution, where the former evolves with a political fitness function, and the latter evolves with an economic fitness function.
Imagine that, it's easy if you try.
One of the critical ways private organizations achieve excellence is by eliminating the worst employees and attempting to replace them with the best. When this strategy is categorically prohibited by union work rules, the result is not only an accumulation of bad teachers but also the poisoning of the school’s culture.
No more schools would mean no more school shootings.
The concept of "civic duty" has all but evaporated. This means all public institutions, including schools, have become an increasingly dead letter.
Having to choose either/or is neither reasonable nor practicable. Public schools were actually quite good when I was attending them [and when my parents did] but the intent then seemed to be education rather than social engineering and brainwashing. Another difference: Children were left behind--held back a grade or two. Classes were also split up into levels of aptitude and ability, not holding back kids who were quicker learners and letting slower ones learn at a slower pace. Can't do that now!
PS: Children I know who were home-schooled were, on average, far ahead of their public schooled contemporaries.
Second sentence in quote shoulda said "gedanken experiment."
But what do I know, I went to public and private schools?
IMHO.
Up ta grade 3 for me.
Char Char beat me to it. I actually thought that was going to be the point of the article when I read the headline.
Separate the question of "should the government pay for x" from "should the government provide x directly"
If X is medical care, you can realize the VA system sucks, and against a British national health service, but in favor of universal health care.
If X is education, you can be in favor of vouchers and against public schools.
They cannot coexist in the market without subsidizing the government provider.
Government schools are neither necessary nor a good thing. Education would be a vigorous, innovative, cost-effective industry if it hadn't been captured so early by the government, and then by a unionized workforce. People mistakenly this mess is ordained by nature. If the colossal misallocation of tax revenue remained in the pockets of citizens, they could purchase something much better for their children, and those in need of assistance could be provided for, to buy the service privately. What we are doing now is an inexcusable waste, and a disgrace. Worst of all, in recent years these soul-destroying institutions have become ideological indoctrination factories, on top of all of their other malevolent defects. Écrasez l'Infâme.
Public schools are obviously a necessity
Government-run schools are far from a necessity. In fact, they have proven to be harmful to a free people.
What has been done successfully is to conflate the good of publicly-financed education with the idea of government-run "public schools." The better system is providing public scholarships to students and their families who can decide for themselves the best place to get their education.
Getting rid of public schools would be one of the greatest things this country could do for its children. They are abysmal, especially where the students need them the most. The only public schools that are worth a crap is in the more affluent neighborhoods where they have the time, money and culture to push their kiddos to succeed. The inner city parents are trying their best just to keep their kids from dealing drugs and pimping.
It is a crime what the inner city children are shackled with for their entire lives.
A silly question as it is a false choice. As Ann notes above, requiring everyone going to a public school is barred by constitutional law, That being said, private schools interject both competition and some price discipline into the education system.
The Jesuits are experts at running a high school but as far as I know the public schools have never taken a cue or tip from the Society of Jesus. The same can be said for the schools run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.
And before any one here jumps me on the basis that the Jesuits cater to the rich, you couldn’t be more wrong. And check out the Cristo Rey schools. Madison would be an ideal place for one. There is one in Milwaukee.
Magic Building Theory runs throughout the article. Private schools have shiny gems. Give public schools the shiny gems and those kids will do as well.
Here's one public school that does really well. If only it could be scaled up. We should figure out what bricks that public school is made of and build all the public schools out of them.
And then most egregious, they say in an all private-school world private schools might lie about their students' attainments in order to keep tuition money going in. For public schools, their faculty would never lie about attainments, offer fake credit recovery classes, lower standards, or spend afternoons altering student answers to standardized tests.
The dozen educators who stood trial, including five teachers and a principal, were indicted in 2013 after years of questions about how Atlanta students had substantially improved their scores on the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, a standardized examination given throughout Georgia.
In 2009, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution started publishing a series of articles that sowed suspicion about the veracity of the test scores, and Gov. Sonny Perdue ultimately ordered an investigation.
The inquiry, which was completed in 2011, led to findings that were startling and unsparing: Investigators concluded that cheating had occurred in at least 44 schools...
Regarding the Magic Building Theory, the Jesuit Middle School of Omaha bought a former YMCA and made some additions to turn it into a school. It is no palace. Nearly 100% of these boys go to college. The students are all minorities. All of this is done for half the cost of the Omaha Public Schools. One of my high school teachers founded the school and ran it for years.
Put Amazon, Apple, Wall Mart, Koch etc in charge of education.
That'll be a twofer: more brainwashed workers and more brainwashed customers.
Actually, a threefer: brainwashed voters = rent finding.
"anti-de Sitter space said...
Up ta grade 3 for me."
Jethro Bodine has you beat by three grades.
@Unknown
"It is a crime what the inner city children are shackled with for their entire lives."
Yep.
@Prole
"One of the critical ways private organizations achieve excellence is by eliminating the worst employees"
Yep.
In an either or situation, I would vote for private schools. For seven years I worked with both public and private schools across the nation. The worst private schools were no worse than the worst public schools. The best private schools were far superior to the best public schools. And there will always be stratification, it's the way of the world.
"But imagining a world in which K-12 education is either all private or all public could help clarify the current discussion on education policy."
Or not.
In the author's defense, that's the assignment she was given by The Atlantic. The headline is oddly misleading.
Public schools are one of worst things Western countries have created, Prussian school system was created by grandparents of Nazis and for some reason lots of other countries decided to use them as well.
Public schools graduate obedient dullards, you are forced to associate with bullies and harrasers, access to knowledge is prescribed, children are treated like cogs in a machine.
I believe France's education system is privately run but is largely paid for by public funds and that is what I would do if I had to create education system.
It took some time for public schools to be widely established in the USA.
Even when that occurred The Bible was read and studied, chiefly as a source of public and private morality in accordance with the views of both The Founders of our Republic and later Presidents and other great Americans.
Since that practice was forbidden by Judges (Amending the Constitution from the bench) the amoral influence of "educators" has led to the destruction of that personal and civic morality. That has yielded the destruction of traditional-and-stable families (The basic unit of civilizations), increased crimes by students who, later become adult thugs, and the endangerment of such freedoms as should be protected by The Bill Of Rights
Americans have a real hard time accepting that half of kids are going to be below average.
There is room for both. We need good public schools, and some of them still exist. I've taught in both; however, most private schools are financially out of reach of the students who might benefit the most from them. School choice would help remedy that. Will that ever come? Who knows? One of the most important variables is the quality of the curriculum and who determines it. A good public school can still have a challenging curriculum, but the PC establishment works very hard to make this difficult. Another major difference is size. Private schools tend to be small. Faculty-student ratios are low. Look at the high school in Parkland, Florida, where the recent shooting took place. It had about 3800 students with virtually no security. No reputable high school should be more than about 1200 students. The Parkland school was the size of three reasonably sized high schools. In fact, it was the size of a small town. Effective schools need to be decentralized, and teachers need more control over curriculum without the fads of schools of education.
Instead of requiring lots of education courses for public school teachers, require instead that each high school teacher complete a comprehensive major in the field in which they teach. And instead of completing a masters in education for a salary increase, require instead a masters in their teaching fields. A well qualified biology teacher, for example, would have a B.S. in biology and an M.A. or M.S. in biology or related sciences.
What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?
"I believe France's education system is privately run but is largely paid for by public funds and that is what I would do if I had to create education system."
Wrong.
This is welfare. A market requires having your own skin in the game when making a decision re the expenditure of dough. Moochers are quick to waste other people's dough. And, this sorta government funded moocherism results higher costs and lamer results.
Tough luck if poor or normal people can't pay for a good (or any) private school, that's what makes an objectivism market place. We all look out for out own interests, sans gov involvement (except for security (e.g. foreign (or domestic (i.e. non-rich getting uppity)) hostility)), and that's best for all.
Carry on.
Richard Dillman suggests: Instead of requiring lots of education courses for public school teachers, require instead that each high school teacher complete a comprehensive major in the field in which they teach. And instead of completing a masters in education for a salary increase, require instead a masters in their teaching fields. A well qualified biology teacher, for example, would have a B.S. in biology and an M.A. or M.S. in biology or related sciences.
Yes! A major factor contributing to the mediocrity of our public schools is the teacher's college.
"Yes! A major factor contributing to the mediocrity of our public schools is the teacher's college."
Elitist librul hogwash.
A better solution is to require that all teachers get degrees from Liberty U (or Trump U, if it can be revived). Doesn't matter what the degree is. Just need to make sure blacks and whites, and gals and guys don't use the same sidewalks.
Problem solved.
Yur welcome, cons.
In 1961 my public grade school had 6 teachers for grades K through 5. My 5th grade teacher was also the principal. There was no administrative staff in the school. The school nurse stopped by once a week and the music teacher came on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
It appears the current administrator/teacher ratio is 1:1.
Our "public schools" have become "government schools". They are all about bureaucracy, regulation and politicized government unions. The schools exist to support the bureaucrats. Students and learning are secondary concerns. Government screws up everything it touches, and government schools touch students.
Combine the destruction of the two parent home with government schools and political correctness and you get the mess we see today.
BTW,
It's a shame Jared's pop wasn't richer. A couple million gets you into Harvard. But, the poor lad's dad couldn't afford top tier: Liberty U. Probably takes five mil. Or more.
A world in which the Government gave vouchers to parents which they could use at any accredited private school, using the funding that presently goes to public schools, doesn't sound so bad at all. Julie Halpert, thanks for helping crystallize the issue.
Lots of silly stuff in there.
Cost has little or nothing to do with outcomes. It serves mainly as a filter, if thats the only one available - only "the right people" can afford it. And the right people is the start of good outcomes. Schools are made by their students, for the most part. Select good or potentially good students, and teachers can teach a great deal, and the kids will moreover teach each other.
Choose a lot of bad material and the school will be shut down by constant drama, the slow will limit the pace, and there will be no knowledge transfer among the kids.
The schools I went to regularly had 50 kids per class. We had no air-conditioning - and that could get brutal in the tropical heat. Our schoolrooms didn't even have glass windows - we had capiz-shell louvers, cheaper at that time and place than window-glass.
What we had were the hardwood desks, blackboard, chalk, paper and pen, a great lot of books, and good professional teachers. And in retrospect, and with a great deal of experience here, a far better education than any one can expect today in US public schools, and most private ones. The selection tool was tuition, these being Catholic private schools, extremely modest by US standards, but more than enough to assure a high quality intake, besides a number of charity boys selected for talent. And then we had religion. We prayed before each class, we recited the rosary, we heard Mass weekly.
For exercise we had a concrete quadrangle to run around in, basketball courts, and a handball court for the Christian Brothers. That was it for amenities.
I have made this point hundreds of times, and it never penetrates. I have seen this point made many more times, in public, with impeccable data, and it never penetrates then either. It seems that in the field of educational policy a professional requirement is a head made of concrete.
"Americans have a real hard time accepting that half of kids are going to be below average."
Oh, I can accept that. The problem is that it is a moving average, as in downward. SAT scores were re-centered as a result.
"besides a number of charity boys selected for talent."
You don't need to use euphemisms.
The dirty little Catholic secret ain't so secret anymore.
Come out of the closet.
Lots of love in this thread from different folks for an institution that institutionalized child rape.
Weirdos 'round here.
As for small size of schools -
Our 1-7 grade school had something like 1200-1400 boys.
My high school had 1700+
Those were typical.
No 15-kid classes for us.
The stupid article reads like an indulgence of cargo cults.
Rich people can afford luxuries, therefore they assume these luxuries are significant in creating the high performance of the children of rich people.
They absolutely are not, most of the world that manages better school outcomes spends far less than the US does on ordinary schools, much less the private schools of of the American rich.
Feynman would have destroyed the fools.
Public school teachers need protection from the local school boards. The NEA (National Education Association) failed to provide that back when it claimed to be a professional association, so the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) arose as an out and out labor union which soon became so successful that the NEA had to follow suit in order to survive.
So, here we are with Tweedledee and Tweedledum labor unions, neither of which could care less about professionalism.
Public schools work just fine when the culture believes in merit and differences in children.
However, when everyone deserves a trophy, no one is different than anyone else, and we must look the other way for bad behavior, then public schools become a disaster.
The answer, in schools and almost everything else, is competition. If you assign a dollar amount per child to a school district, then allow that money to follow them wherever they go (Public school or private or charter or home schooled etc).
But, if you do this, public schools will collapse under the weight of competition. Because in many areas in this country, public schools suck horribly and parents would gleefully pull their children out and put them somewhere more productive.
PB&J, one day I would like to meet you.
This is uncharitable of me, but yes indeed I would.
What if all public school and teachers unions were eliminated. All education would become private with each parent being given choice of schools in the area, ratings for education and safety, and current funds now paid for each students education. The new and existing private schools could have great flexibility on the curriculum offered and n hiring their own teachers and safety staff. They could be gun free or have arms on site with qualified experts. The parents could choose, and could add to their children’s education funding as desired. The new private schools could pair up with local business to offer a wide variety of options such as trade schools. This would get the federal and state governments largely out of education.
Eric, that's it in a nutshell. In education, as in anything else, one size does not fit all. Schools now teach to the lowest common denominator.
I don't see why homeschooling was left out of the thought experiment. Most homeschoolers do very well in college and it is much cheaper. Homeschool numbers are steadily increasing. Why disregard this alternative?
The other thing I noticed was the emphasis on equality - would public or private schools be more equal? I'd say - neither. There is no equality among different public schools and certainly not among private schools. There seemed to be an idea in the article that equality was just a government program away. But it always seems to me that people want different things so it's very hard to tell who is ahead or who is unequal. (Not of course in the case of the students of inner city schools run as teacher' union fiefs.) Is the one reading poetry unequal to the one reading law? Is the sports hero ahead of the Chess Club? Is the brainy one who won't work equal to the average guy trying hard if their marks are the same?
Buw,
I don't give the Benedick XVI to dudes. Sorry for you.
Oops. I just committed one of the worst sins in English: the above should read: ... neither of which could not care less about professionalism.
Buwaya asserts: PB&J, one day I would like to meet you.
This is uncharitable of me, but yes indeed I would.
And I would like to bear witness to the meeting. ;-)
anti-de Sitter space: "Lots of love in this thread from different folks for an institution that institutionalized child rape."
Who mentioned UN Agencies or lefty Hollywood?
I am not sure the article conveys a fair comparison of public and private schools. Having watched two children endure some of both, and having sat on school boards for both (public schools have elected boards), I can confirm that the differences are dramatic. Even in California—which may be the most diverse real estate on the planet—the state government prescribes a one size fits all prescription on public schools through an arcane formula. That means very little local discretion. Time is spent with checking boxes, complying with state mandates, and answering to state functionaries about apparent discrepancies. Private schools scramble for funds, pay teachers less though the teachers are more interesting—a former prosecutor teaching civics, Peace Corps worker in Africa who leads field trips back, language teachers who are actually native speakers. Public schools often supplement funds but teachers are paid more and have a “certificate” (a hurdle private schools don't impose) though teachers usually bring very little life experience to the classroom. It’s a safe job after a few years. Much, much more can be said.
My suggestions for reform of US K-12 -
- Get rid of schools of education. They are just indoctrination centers for falsehoods and stupidity.
- Restore local catchments for enrollment - get rid of "integration" schemes.
- Restore selection; pull above-average kids into separate schools, or separate classes if that is all that can be done. Especially try to "mine" talent in populations of underperforming minorities. Likewise, remove and isolate the severely underperforming and the disruptive.
- Give up on "mainstreaming" kids with disabilities unless the accommodations truly are minimal. The iconic kid in a wheelchair is rarely a problem, the kid with severe psychological issues is.
- Restore a nationalist, unifying theme in curricula and school culture, as the US once did and most of the world still does. Part of what makes Catholic schools successful is not just that they are all taught the same religion, intellectually, but that this comes with uniform ethics, values, rituals, customs. If you are going to have secular schools you will have to teach a secular religion, with all those elements.
- Restore trades, crafts, and apprenticeships - consider the German model.
- Reduce or eliminate school liability
- Far more PE. American kids are generally in poor shape by high school. They need far more exercise.
Norway had a pretty good system when I was growing up 70-odd years ago, and high school teachers indeed had to have "major" degree in their major field of teaching plus a "minor" in education. To become a "lektor" (with better pay and privileges), they had to have a master's degree in their field.
This being a long time before they found oil in the North Sea, so so neither the buildings nor the materials were any kind of ritzy, and in fact the materials were also rather out of date due to WWII and the German occupation.
Still, when I applied to the civil engineering dept. at U of Wash., my Norwegian high school credits got me out of about the first semester's worth of freshman classes (and I really think there should have been a couple more, since some classes still were just a rehash of what I had covered in high school, perhaps with some added twists, such as a third term for three dimensional calculus, etc.)
Blogger anti-de Sitter space said...
"Yes! A major factor contributing to the mediocrity of our public schools is the teacher's college."
"Elitist librul hogwash.
A better solution is to require that all teachers get degrees from Liberty U (or Trump U, if it can be revived). Doesn't matter what the degree is. Just need to make sure blacks and whites, and gals and guys don't use the same sidewalks.
Problem solved.
Yur welcome, cons."
If the above doesn't convince you that a public education is a waste of time, well......
I support public funding of Education. It just doesn't have to be funneled through a labor cartel.
"my Norwegian high school credits got me out of about the first semester's worth of freshman classes"
Didn't have quarters back then?
While I'm skeptical of public school teacher unions to some extent, they can help provide better educations in smaller school districts. In small school districts in rural areas, it is not unusual for nepotism in hiring to be the rule and not the exception. In such districts it is very common for hired teachers to be related to school board members and/or administrators. Without unions to protect teachers, these faculties might be more inbred than they currently are. I have seen lots of evidence for this kind of nepotism.
"That means very little local discretion. '
You are completely correct. There is very little local control of public schools in CA, its about as centralized as the French Ministry of Education, in curriculum, funding, personnel policy, etc.
De Gaulle once boasted he could tell on any given day what page in what book each French child was reading.
Rusty,
Until way up, I was only in private schools. Private Christian schools.
So....
And, being Norwegian, I am dead set against any separation of "gifted" and "slow" students.
Teach down the middle, and the slower kids just have to decide whether to study harder or drop out of the academic high school and perhaps go to a vocational school.
I certainly do not accept that any government bureaucracy should be permitted to grade and classify students in this manner.
As someone with a daughter in California public schools, I couldn't be happier. She's in a public charter school (it's public, but entrance is based on a lottery system). I'm thrilled with her progress and experience.
I can't speak to what public education is like in other countries or in the middle of last century. But even though I went into this year suspicious, I couldn't be happier. They have a lot of flexibility, and she has a wonderful teacher. Her reading has really taken off as all her interest of learning on a lot of other topics.
The school has a lottery entrance, but part of the application is committing to about 30 hours of volunteer time per family. So, it self-edits according to parents who are involved with their kids education. There's a lot of opportunities for volunteer work in "off-hours" so it's not cutting out two income families, or single parents.
Saying this with all honesty: I wouldn't send my kids to a public school, period. I would consider it child abuse.
Didn't have quarters back then?
Not sure what you are talking about. UW and UNM both had fall and spring semesters and summer school. In the summers I was working, trying to get together enough money to get back to school in the fall. I had GI Bill - $135/month, which was about enough to pay for tuition and books - but we had to be in school for a month before we could claim it, and then it took the Gov't another month to deliver and the university wanted 1/3 down, irrc, plus, of course, the books were up front.
"and the slower kids just have to decide whether to study harder or drop out of the academic high school and perhaps go to a vocational school."
There is very rarely such an option in the US. All high schools are ostensibly "academic".
"I certainly do not accept that any government bureaucracy should be permitted to grade and classify students in this manner."
They do much worse as it is. And in a few places in the US you have public academic high schools with competitive examinations.
Feynmann had a wonderful chapter about his experience with the California public schools' book selection board in "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynmann!"
mockturtle,
Yes! A major factor contributing to the mediocrity of our public schools is the teacher's college.
This. I'm not even talking about undergraduate ed. schools, which are abysmal, but about the credentializing that takes place whenever someone expert in a field tries to dip a toe into public education.
Stop me if you've read this before ... but my husband taught music at private schools in CA for well over a decade, then was lured up to OR to teach at public schools. The first thing he had to do was get an Ed. degree, and it's only by virtue of a loophole in OR law that he was allowed to teach while earning it. But it doesn't stop there. "Professional development" must be ongoing. You need to add more points every year; it never stops.
Incidentally, y'all ought to see the textbooks he brought home while earning his second Master's. You'd think that, with all that coerced student income, someone might have thought to hire a proper proofreader.
Hagar,
UW currently (and going back a bit, though not anywhere near your time) has quarters not semesters.
Hagar,
And, being Norwegian, I am dead set against any separation of "gifted" and "slow" students.
Teach down the middle, and the slower kids just have to decide whether to study harder or drop out of the academic high school and perhaps go to a vocational school.
So you would let the "slow" students sink or swim, but what about the "gifted" students?
"Education" for what? And Why?
Until you can answer those questions clearly and substantively, all talk of "Education" is meaningless.
Why are we sending young people to school until they are 18, and what are "we" supposed to be teaching them?
Why are we requiring them to "go to college" to get a good white collar job or be a Professional? What they are supposed to be learning? Or it just a Filtering process?
The English 11-plus system of selection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
Hagar,
UC/Berkeley went off quarters and on to semesters ca. 1980. I think the semester system is pretty much universal in the US by now.
The main difference between public and private schools is that in private schools, the parent is the customer, free to choose another school if the current school is performing poorly.
In public schools ... just who is the customer? Not the parents. Probably a combination of the government and the teacher's union.
If you read in the paper about a school that instituted some insane rule or suspended a kid for drawing a picture of a gun or making his index finger and thumb into the shape of gun, that school will be a public school. Private schools have no incentive to annoy a parent with that kind of nonsense, knowing that they will lose business by it.
Public schools worked pretty well before unions.
One problem making comparisons is that that period was also one in which smart college girls majored in Education and taught for a few years while husbands were getting careers begun.
Those smart young women now have other options.
Now Education majors are the bottom quintile of college students.
The quality of teachers has virtually crashed the past 40 years. Unions have made it worse and some good teachers flee to charter or private schools.
The obsession with reducing the "School to Prison Pipeline" has destroyed discipline and turned schools with significant minority (black and brown) populations into hellish centers of chaos.
Like the Florida school.
She's in a public charter school (it's public, but entrance is based on a lottery system). I'm thrilled with her progress and experience.
My grandchildren are in a charter school, which seems a big improvement over the neighborhood public school.
My grandson was having trouble with math in 4th grade and his teacher told his mother that she could not work the problems in Core Curriculum, either.
She suggested his mother teach him using traditional math methods.
public schools date back to the time when it was necessary to get the children of immigrants indoctrinated as Americans and to leave behind the old country. the parents agree with this
anti-de Sitter space said...
Rusty,
Until way up, I was only in private schools. Private Christian schools.
So....
3/5/18, 8:23 PM
Well, even good schools have their dunces. Someone's gotta be the dumbest kid in the class. Sure looks like you fulfilled that role in those private Christian schools.
After all, reading is for nerds. You're proud of being a dimwit.
The Norwegian system at that time was:
Everybody starts school the year the become 7 years of age.
Everybody takes grades 1--7 of elementary school.
If not going farther, a mandatory 8th grade.
1st and 2nd grade of high school, the same for everybody who continues.
If not going farther, 3d grade, or "middle school," is separate.
Grades 3--5 of high school leads to examen artium and those who pass may apply to the university or technical high school. Grades 3--5 divided into two parallel lines in most communities; on with emphasis on math and physics, and one with emphasis on history and languages. The math and physics line mandatory for medical or engineering schools.
This was the academic public school system.
Pupils who dropped out after the 8th grade would then usually go on to some sort of agricultural school if they were farmers, seaman school if they were intending to become sailors, etc.
Pupils who dropped out with "middle school" diplomas would most often go on to a 1 or 2 year "business school" or some other more advanced form of vocational school
So you would let the "slow" students sink or swim, but what about the "gifted" students?
Also sink or swim. If they intend to go to college, they had better swim, because each college dept. should have is counterpart to UNM Engineering Dept.'s "freshman chemistry class" back when, wherein the goats would be separated from the sheep without mercy. (Actually the other way around, since goats are what you want in engeneering.)
The fact that this thought experiment cannot allow for homeschooling or charters tells you all you need to know about public education. T.S to the poor kids who's parents actually care.
Growing up in SE Michigan, I remember each and every year one of the schools districts in the area would be hit with a teachers strike. I also remember that our oh-so-liberal and progressive school district (Ann Arbor) was condemned for its segregated nature.
You don't need to use euphemisms.
The dirty little Catholic secret ain't so secret anymore.
Come out of the closet.
Do you ever comment here when you're not drunk? Just curious.
Sorry to disrupt your ignorance but public schools have much higher rates of sexual misconduct toward students than do Catholic schools. I've got better things to do than provide links for you so you'll have to research it yourself.
Or, whether you are accepted in the first place depend on your high school grades, which I think is less desirable.
In Norway when I graduated from high school, it took all straight A's to get into medical school or technical high school.
I needed not even think about engineering school, since - while not exactly a sheep - I had not put much effort into making grades either, so I only had a B average. It took the U.S. Army to make it clear to me I had better hustle, and they did at least do a rather good job of that.
K-12 will not improve until the colleges get serious about doing the "freshman chemistry" thing.
Michael K, my daughter's school seems to do a blended approach, some Common Core and some traditional.
We're in a decent neighborhood that is very, very diverse (no majority, and people from anywhere you can think of), so I suspect there's a lot of push for traditional approaches to teaching from all sorts of directions.
She has a little core stuff in reading and math, but also traditional. It seems to work.
Whichever you prefer, imagine it run by leftists and see how it turns to shit, "unexpectedly".
Many public teachers and all their unions are leftists.
I have friends who spend all their disposable income and much of their free time sending their kids to private school. Although I support private schools, I have attempted more than once to talk them out of this, becuase it's keeping them relatively poor. They would never send their kids to public schools even if they had to sacrifice everything, which they practically do. The mother is a long-time public school teacher, and both of them are liberals, but this is their kids were talking about. Fen's law describes reality again.
I appreciate the comments of charter schools. Some can be very good, but some have also been unsuccessful.
Several in Minnesota have been shut down. Good charter schools are a step towards school choice.
You are very fortunate if your kids are in exemplary charter schools.
For final grades graduating from high school, we had 5 written exams for which we were given 5 hours to complete. The papers were done on special papers - somewhat larger than 8½x14 and glossy - with real pens and ink, and neatness counted.
They were: Math, Physics, Norwegian I and II (don't ask!) composition, and English composition.
Then, I think 3 oral exams in randomly selected courses. We were told which students would be examined in which courses at 8 AM, and the examinations started at 9 AM. The courses could be from any one of our five years of high school.
The grades we had received in the classes when they were taken would remain the final grade for the curses we were not examined in.
I loved growing up in public schools, but having put a couple kids though them in Los Angeles, they seem pretty scary and abusive now. Nothing at all like what I attended in the 60's and 70's, which was the beginning of big, truely public schools and probably the end of them being quality community values oriented places. As a popular book of the time argued, "Small is Beautiful".
The option of requiring everyone to go to public school is barred by constitutional law.
Well, there are de jure, legal prohibitions against sending your kids to a non-state school, and then there is the financial method of creating/maintaining a monopoly. Public school systems, backed by the unlimited taxing power of the state, are able to spend, spend, spend, which puts upward pressure on the non-state schools to increase their tuition to keep up, thereby pricing them beyond most people's ability to pay.
This coming year, Arlington County school district plans to spend $636.7 million for an enrollment of 27,000 students. That's nearly $23,600 per student.
Perhaps there's a half step. Search for Maurice McTigue speaking on the New Zealand Miracle.
Everyone, absolutely everyone is a member of a union including politicians.
They had every education problem we have and they solved it, terrible performance by their minority population in schools with dispirited teachers who believed they were underpaid, and arguably were given their environment. The reason for change was the country went broke and couldn't borrow any more money and had sold off everything of value. and priced controlled everything including salaries. They'd fallen from first world status to 2nd and were well on their way to 3rd. So they negotiated their way out, never breaking a contract. A wonderful story. They gave the schools to the parents, as their board, and the money followed the child and was given to the parents of a child with no restriction on where it was spent. They also did the same thing with welfare, it went to the mothers never the father's and who spent it was enforced. A miracle happened, the worst school in the country became the best, and it was all minority. And since the money followed the child when a class lost a child in the common room teachers discussed who and how that child was lost. Two and you're out of here said his peers, unless we chose to take a pay cut.Lots of people want your job.No union steward could override.There was only so much money. Tiny change, Not choice as we know it. but even better results.
I teach history in a suburban public high school. Some thoughts:
1) I believe in choice. Parents should have the widest array of options possible. I believe in private schools, charter schools, and home schooling. Competition is always good and always produces better results.
2) I believe that government should provide a free basic education to all through public schools. It is in the best interests of us all to have the best educated populace possible.
3) I do not believe in "college for all". The idea is absurd. Not only is it not necessary, it is saddling far too many people with huge amounts of student debt. Public schools should concentrate more on vocational education than they do college prep, not less. Teach the kids basic literacy and numeracy, how to balance a budget and some basic civics.
4) Bring back tracking. Tracking is when you group students in a subject by ability level. It has been forbidden in U.S. public schools since the 1980's because of the unpleasant demographics it produces. Mixing ability levels holds back the quickest students and frustrates the slower ones.
5) Start a campaign to push back against the idea that being successful in school is inauthentic and acting White.
By your description Hagar, the Norwegian system is very strongly tracked, except in the first nine years.
It seems very similar to various other European systems, the German one in particular.
The US system is, by comparison, hardly tracked at all, in most places.
The other significant difference is that there is likely a much higher average, and minimum, in the intake in Grade 1 in Norway, vs, say, Oakland or Los Angeles. American problems in this area are far more extreme.
This coming year, Arlington County school district plans to spend $636.7 million for an enrollment of 27,000 students. That's nearly $23,600 per student.
I bet at least half of that goes to administration.
Private school saved my life.
I went to public school in Chicago through the fourth grade. I was bored and kept getting kicked out of class for talking out of turn. (There was some discipline those days).
In third grade I tested at the top level in Spelling, Math and English. In fourth grade, I got a D in spelling and the equivalent of B's in Math and English. I was definitely a troubled child, bored with school and a future dropout candidate.
In the fifth grade, I was given a scholarship to a private school. My grades and behavior improved immensely. I am the only person in my immediate (working class) family to earn a Bachelor's degree, much less a Ph.D. and two other advanced degrees.
Public schools have only gotten worse in Chicago over the past 50+ years. It turns out more criminals and people without marketable job skills than it does productive citizens.
It is a crime and a scam.
Blogger Earnest Prole said...
A better thought experiment would be to ask what if America did not have teachers' unions.
--
Worth a repeat.
I remember reading the WEAC charter right before Act 10 hit and was amazed at the formalized protection from oversight and results written into it.
In the Physics universe, a valid gedankenexperiment MUST be theoretically possible to implement.
Over the last century, it has been characteristic of the social world to attempt to adopt the trappings of other fields, especially physics, in an effort to gain credibility or rigour.
This Atlantic article is merely the latest example.
What kind of societal and governmental context would be prerequisite for either of the article's scenarios to exist? Hmm, not considered at all, I see.
From the linked piece: "Attending a school that colleges looked more favorably on was a plus, Aris said, but she didn’t feel that Saline offered anything that their Lincoln educations didn’t."
Interesting to see the piece open with Detroit Country Day and Bloomfield Hills High School, my alma mater. I had a chance to attend Country Day, but desperately talked my mom out of it because I didn't like the rich jerks I knew who went there. Over at BH, we were just barely more diverse and ranked as one of the top 10 public schools in the country. I suppose it was an excellent educational environment.
What I know for sure is, my teachers were still friggin' idiots, with a handful of nice exceptions. Teachers are often not from the top of their class to begin with, and the BH students -- coming primarily from affluent two-parent homes -- demographically consisted of about 80 percent kids who were smarter than the faculty.
So all we really got out of the school was the good environment: high expectations, no violence, few distractions of that nature. I doubt it could have been better at Country Day. And I'm all but certain each individual kid's outcome would be the same at either school, because the key variables are not the school or the teachers, but the kids themselves and the parents.
I don't think the government can fix education (having long ago screwed it up). At best, it can keep kids safe, which still seems to be a problem at many schools. But beyond that, I doubt there's much effect policy can have. Not all problems have solutions, much as we might wish it were so.
UC/Berkeley went off quarters and on to semesters ca. 1980. I think the semester system is pretty much universal in the US by now.
I don’t know how things are elsewhere, but — except for Berkeley and (the most recently established campus [2005]; intended to take overflow from Berkeley, to wit) Merced — all of the (10) campuses of the University of California operate on the quarter system.
awesome post! thx for share this important information sir! keep up the good work :)
Agen Judi Bola SBOBET
Prediksi Bola
Agen Judi Casino SBOBET
Situs Daftar Judi SBOBET
Crimso,
"What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?"
It wouldn't have mattered, because no one would have known how to fly it.
The biggest issue is lack of parental interest/involvement in the children getting a good education. That is a significant factor in the schools' unwillingness to discipline appropriately, and it doesn't take many students in a classroom who don't care to seriously degrade the experience for everyone in that classroom.
Along those lines, a small percentage of poor teachers have a disproportionate impact on the student body as a whole. Example - a K-5 school, with 4 rooms per class, has 24 teachers total. One poor teacher (4% of the teaching force) negatively impacts 25% of the students.
"Mixing ability levels holds back the quickest students and frustrates the slower ones."
An alternative is a small public school system (four year high school with 400 students) with a solidly middle class majority (children of farmers, teachers, factory workers, shop owners, office workers, and independent professionals) whose parents survived WWII and the Great Depression with a substantial minority of children of first generation, upwardly mobile immigrants. In high school, students could opt for either vocational or academic emphasis. In other words, we miss the school systems of small-town America in the 1950s and 1960s.
See Charles Murray's Coming Apart for a discussion of what we have lost in that regard.
exhelodrvr1 said...
The biggest issue is lack of parental interest/involvement in the children getting a good education. That is a significant factor in the schools' unwillingness to discipline appropriately, and it doesn't take many students in a classroom who don't care to seriously degrade the experience for everyone in that classroom.
Exactly! I would add that many of those kids probably don't have a father in their lives, whether due to death, incarceration, divorce or just never marrying the mother. If you want to look at a really pernicious social epidemic, fatherless children is right at the top of the list, as they probably make up more than their share of children with disciplinary problems (and ignored disciplinary problems like the Parkland school shooter and the Newtown school shooter as well). Children, especially boys, need a father to provide a male role model.
The best high school in Nebraska, in my opinion, has 329 girls.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why the public schools don’t offer parents the choice of a small single sex school.
anti-de Sitter space said...
"Rusty,
Until way up, I was only in private schools. Private Christian schools.
So...."
Alas. I'm sure they tried.
Public schools were fine when I was a kid. The problem is that the staff has gone PC; and as far as I know that happened in private schools too.
Liberals believe that if the government doesn't buy everyone's groceries, they'll end up starving in the gutter.
@buwaya,
All of those decisions about which "track" to take were made by the pupils and their parents; not nitwit "experts."
Oh, and I only know what the system was 70 years ago. One must do as the Americans do, so by now I would not be surprised to hear it has been pretty well "Californicated."
All that oil money too. The Gov't would spend a lot of it to "help the children," which would not be good for them.
Good exercise by the librul Atlantic. Now they should do Social Security and Medicare programs.
My mother went to school in Camden, NJ in the 1930's. Conditions at her school were appalling by today's standards. Teachers were paid very little. None had advanced degrees. Yet she and the overwhelming majority of her classmates,black and white, came out literate, able to do common math problems, with a good understanding of grammar and spelling, and with a good understanding of history and civics. She came out a functional citizen able to get a job.
Today, Camden has among the highest per student spending of any school in NJ, the highest dropout rate, and 80% of its students can't pass basic proficiency tests. They are not just unemployed, but unemployable. For the rest of their lives.
It is not about spending or teacher's salaries and credentials, or shiny new schools. It is about liberalism run amok, with all of its consequences.
Jersey Fled, I agree. My mother in law had to leave high school in 1930 when she was sixteen due to family illness. My uncle only had a grade school education. Both were literate, able to do math etc. (everything you mention). I was an adult literacy tutor for about 15 years - many of the students were high school graduates who could barely read. That being said, many illiterate people are intelligent - they just didn't get the help they needed when they needed it. The retired nuns who began and ran the literacy center taught hundreds of adults on a shoestring budget. I (and others) would bring in used paper from the office so they could use the unprinted side for worksheets etc. The focus was on the basics and actual writing - as Sr. Marie (God rest her soul) told me when I asked her about the latest teaching fad, it won't work for the average student because it doesn't give them the tools they need to figure things out.
Would any high school counselor have recommended that AA go to law school?
"And, being Norwegian, I am dead set against any separation of "gifted" and "slow" students.
Teach down the middle, and the slower kids just have to decide whether to study harder or drop out of the academic high school and perhaps go to a vocational school.
I certainly do not accept that any government bureaucracy should be permitted to grade and classify students in this manner."
Might work with a very homogeneous population. But in most situations, I think that you need tracking.
My kid would have gone to the same school district as my brothers and I did, 30-40 years earlier. Even then, in one of the best public high schools in the state, there were problems. The soft subjects were taught by women, who wanted to treat the boys like girls. Not nearly as bad as it has gotten in public education over the last half century, of course, but it adversely affected my education, and hurt one of my brothers more. Deportment and conformity were rewarded, while being male was penalized. I didn't discover the joy of history until my. 40s as a result, and still have not discovered the joy of literature, despite having been a vociferous reader since about 3rd grade. Maybe 2nd. Loved STEM precisely because it was objective, at least back then. I could still ace the classes by acing the tests. Now home work and group projects seem to count more than actually mastering the subject matter.
While my experiences with public school were mediocre, my kid's mother's experiences were worse. She was counseled to get married and have kids. Or, if she insisted on college, to go to a woman's college. One year of that was more than enough. She shouldn't try those hard guy courses. Etc. Never mind that both her father and mother's brother were electrical engineers. Ended up with 3 STEM degrees, after getting her grades back up in community college for a year after her disasterous freshman year. So, with that, and only one kid, the choice was easy - we put our kid in the best private school we could afford, and couldn't have been happier. Out of almost 100 in their class, only one they know of dropped out of college. The kid's two best friends got their doctorates last year, and they are defending their PhD dissertation this spring.
One of the other things driving our decision was having gone to college with a good mix of private and public schoolers. Even back then, the private schoolers just were better prepared. One of the starkest examples though was my best friend. He had been going to public school in Denver, and by 7th grade, was reading at a 4th grade level. His parents panicked, and, both graduates of a small (top 10) liberal arts college, worried that he wouldn't graduate from HS. So, they spent his college fund on private school. Within a couple weeks, they had diagnosed him as dyslexic, and by the end of the first year, he was reading a year ahead of his grade. Looking back though, I think that they might have done as well sending him to a Catholic (boys) school, which were top notch back then. Even though Protestant, that is what Condi Rice's parents did there a couple years later (girl's school though - St Mary's Academy).
Crimso,
"What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?"
It wouldn't have mattered, because no one would have known how to fly it.
And where would it take off from?
"A thought experiment might contribute some clarity". Or not. It might be an attempt to confuse the issue by subtracting the very thing that school choice advocates are seeking - choice and competition.
Even in first grade, we had groups based on learning level. In reading, for instance, we would have groups 1, 2 and 3. In math we would also have three groups, group one being the fastest learners. A person might be in group 1 in math but group 2 in reading but the overall goal was students learning optimally at their own speed.
I can't imagine an all-private system without vouchers for those who can't afford tuition.
And I can't imagine vouchers without government oversight, for without them at least some "schools" would let the children play all day, and then buy off the parent/parents with free stuff and/or rebates.
But with (government) oversight we're back to government control, as withdrawal of government approval would force most voucher schools to close. Even if that control is indirect instead of direct (as in a government owned-and-operated school), it's still control.
And so what we're left with is: perhaps the quality of education depends at least as much on the quality of the students and parents as on the quality of the teachers and the school.
At the extremes one has parents who just don't care (yet the public perceives a publoic interest in educating these parents' children anyway). And at the other there are parents who do care but who lack access to good schools (or the money to pay for them).
And, yes, I'd guess few are aware today that the public culture of the USA was, until 1960 or so, overwhelmingly Protestant. And therefore that Protestant culture is mostly what one one once found in public schools. And thus the establishment of once-extensive Catholic parochial school systems by those who did not want their children to be educated in such an overwhelmingly Protestant environment.
If you want to send your children to private school, do it yourself. Don't expect me to pay for vouchers.
Homeschooling can work, but has 2 problems. There may not be a teacher available for everyone (a 1:1 relationship is also inefficient), and the homeschooled I have known are socially inept. This can be a better outcome than certain other choices.
Also note that in the Norwegian system of long ago, the alternate schools that pupils might choose to go on to were outside the public school system. Agricultural schools belonged to the county or the state, but Dept. of Agriculture, not Education. Maritime schools were supported by the industry and ranged from a couple of months course for deckhands to a full-blown "university course" for budding ship designers, business schools were private and ranged from courses for beginning shop clerks to MBA and relied on tuition and their reputation for delivering the goods.
There was no monopoly by a single Gov't department.
And again, the choice of where to go lay with the students and their families.
It surprises me that nobody has so far detected the totalitarian presumption underlying this deceptively posed alternative.
All private schools >>>> there would be no pretext to tax anybody
start from there.
"The option of requiring everyone to go to public school is barred by constitutional law."
but is it true? has this been litigated and struck down by Court?
The compulsion impulse >>>> to requiring everyone to go to public school is barred by constitutional law.
FTFY; but is it true?
We can clarify this further: only private newspapers, or only government owned and controlled newspapers?
“If you want to send your children to private school, do it yourself. Don't expect me to pay for vouchers.”
If you want to send your children to a government school, do it yourself. Don’t expect me to pay for the government school.
Jethro Bodine has you beat by three grades.
And it shows.
"What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?"
A dozen WWI-vintage rifled cannon with a good supply of shells would have benefited him more; they would have been more-or-less recognizable and usable by his gunners (though calculating indirect fire would have been outside their experience.)
"The option of requiring everyone to go to public school is barred by constitutional law."
but is it true? has this been litigated and struck down by Court?
Since you came in after the discussion was largely over, it looks like no one was around to answer --
Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), striking down an Oregon statute that required all children to attend public school. From the opinion -- "The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State."
Judi Online sekarang ini semakin menarik. Dengan hadiah yang besar dan modal yang kecil, resiko yang anda dapatkan sangat kecil. Yuk langsung bermain di dewaasia!
Untuk informasi cara bermain lebih lanjutnya anda bisa klik link yang ada di bawah ini untuk melihatnya.
http://fursanesports.com/page/3/
bermain di situs idn poker bisa dapat banyak keuntungan uang asli setiap hari dengan mudah dan banyak permainan judi yang bisa di mainkan dengan mudah anda juga bisa dapat banyak bonus besar
https://www.producthunt.com/@juragan_88
Indojokerbet situs terpercaya indonesia, slot deposit pulsa tanpa potongan
agen joker123 resmi yang bisa kamu mainkan dengan game lain seperti livecasino dan 918KISS
https://sites.google.com/view/indojokerbet/t
Slot Deposit pulsa tanpa potongan indojokerbet adalah agen joker123 terpercaya
akun game yang mudah dimainkan dalam smartphone kamu saat ini
https://sites.google.com/view/indojokerbet/t
Post a Comment