I am excited about this approach and I think LeBron's organization has put a lot of though and work with experts on this project.
- This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is making a point of taking at-risk students.
- Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused. Unfortunately the home environment for a lot of kids makes it so hard for these kids to be able to focus at school. In my wife's elementary school classes some kids show up with just a hamburger bun for breakfast. Others fall asleep immediately at school since they live with 5+ siblings and there are literally no available beds at home. I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either, a lot of the time there are single parents just trying to get by and make ends meet and don't know what more they can do.
- Focussing on the teachers will also help. Teachers and unions have been vilified by Governor Kasich but they are not the main problem at all (it is the tragic home environments) with ridiculous review systems and standards, but then there is little support in challenging districts like in Akron/Cleveland. It is a lot easier to work in the suburbs where the kids would progress and learn even without teachers, so that is where everyone wants to go since a good rating is automatic. I think this problem occurs in just about every field where metrics dominate the review system (medicine, call centers, QA, etc). The turnover for teachers at local charter schools is terrible and only seems to attract early-career teachers who couldn't get a job at a public school.
- This doesn't seem to be a short term flashy project but has been years in the making. None of the features here are gimmicky, but just like many things in life it takes a lot of hard work!
- Adding the goal of college education shows a path forward which a lot of students don't think is possible.
I am super excited to be from Akron and I hope this model proves successful!
> Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused.
The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.
>The middle one is absolutely true, the other two I really doubt e.g. in Finland or Germany, schoolday starts around 9AM and ends around 2PM, yielding 3h30 to 4h studies a day accounting for breaks, 5 days/week, with little homework (maybe 5h/week total). Afternoon is usually dedicated to clubs.
In the context of at-risk kids, I think the idea is to maximize the amount of time the kids get to spend away from their toxic and stressful home environments.
I am a bit skeptical of the overall "minimize idle time" idea, though. They seem to be on board with giving the kids enough free time to do independent study and stuff, but whether that's any good will depend on how it's implemented.
If the problem is toxic home environments though, why aren't people suggesting that we cut out the middle man and focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it?
It seems that everyone is recognizing this is the problem, but the solutions all revolve around school, when it really doesn't have anything to do with schools.
>If the problem is toxic home environments though, why aren't people suggesting that we cut out the middle man and focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it?
Because the prospect of forcibly separating kids from their parents based on the decisions of aloof and poorly managed bureaucrats is a political and ethical nightmare.
The solution revolves around schools because schools are considered a legitimate area of public concern while individuals' family-lives (barring some extreme circumstances) are not.
Also, this program provides job training and counseling services for the parents of the kids too.
Boarding schools don't work for poor communities because the kids are often relied upon to do work for the family. This can mean helping with the family enterprise or it can mean older kids taking care of younger kids, elderly family members, or just helping out around the house.
> Because the prospect of forcibly separating kids from their parents based on the decisions of aloof and poorly managed bureaucrats is a political and ethical nightmare.
Well, yeah, it was mostly producing non-aloof and well-managed bureaucrats (and dealing with similar problems in the people to whom they hand off kids), but at that point you've created a solution that still involves forcible separation. You might as well try to address the problems motivating separation, since you you've posed a similarly difficult problem as a partial mitigation.
I would have loved to attend a boarding school growing up...but living in a toxic family environment isn't so simple for the family or the kid. My mother enabled my alcoholic father, my sisters and I tried to protect each other, it would have been tragic to pull us all apart. I was out of the house as much as possible with school clubs and extra curricular like the boy scouts. Leaving my extended family, friends, etc and the shame of being a "foster" kid is a huge charge for someone in a toxic environment. Also abusive families are not black and white, there are good moments. After school programs, sports, music etc are a lifesaver for students with problems at home.
There are a lot of people working extremely hard in that field. It's just not very flashy or politically salient since it's so personal so it's very hard to rally people around it to get some more funding to these programs. Taking kids away from their parents always goes through the courts and is not in any way as simple as you make it out to be.
Giving away your kids, even if you've fucked your life up is not something most people want to do voluntarily.
Ideas like this are always presented as a "common sense" solution like "let's reduce welfare fraud" and no one would disagree with that, and then in actual implementation it ends up being "let's target poor people, people of color, and immigrant families" even if that's not what was intended from the start.
I fail to see how fixing broken homes (which we don't have a ready-made solution for) is an easier solution than making school more helpful to kids (one solution to which is what this article is about), so I don't think the parent's argument is made in good faith.
For what it's worth, children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated. So we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart" and against supporting "families as they are".
> My findings suggest that on average, parents who are on the margin of incarceration are likely to reduce the amount of schooling their child attains if they instead remain in the household. This can be explained because the removal from the household of a violent parent or a negative role model can create a safer environment for a child (Johnson, 2008; Jaffee et al., 2003). Incarceration is also a mechanism that can limit the intergenerational transmission of violence, substance abuse, and crime to children. This result also relates to findings in other fields that conclude that See Kling (2006), Aizer and Doyle, 2013; Di Tella and Schargrodsky (2013), Mueller-Smith, 2015; and Bhuller et al., 2016, among others. For example, using data from Sweden, Hjalmarsson and Lindquist (2007) report significant father-son correlations in criminal activity that begin to appear between ages 7 and 12, and are 3 the positive effects of being raised by one’s parents depend on the quality of care they can provide (Jaffee et al., 2003).
You summarized the paper as, “children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated.”
The one study you’re citing here might suggest your summary statement if “parents on the margin of incarceration” was equivalent to “children from at-risk families”. But those are very different concepts.
You can have an at risk family just by being low-income. Certainly many low-income families are drawn into crime, but by no means all, or even a majority, of low-income families, have a parent who is at the margin of incarceration.
I think the only thing you can reasonably conclude from this study is that leniency in the judicial system towards parents just because they’re parents may be misguided.
They are overlapping. Moreover, "parents on the margin of incarceration" are an extremely significant group of parents for whom the discussion of "supporting families as is" vs. "ripping apart" is meaningful at all. For most poor families it's irrelevant as there's no grounds for dissolution.
I believe you can't deny that it's much more common and publicly acceptable to claim that such a criminal parent should be shown leniency when possible, because having no parent at all is horrible. Yet we have evidence to the contrary.
I concede that this may be inapplicable for some other cases (or at least that we have no proof that it would be applicable yet). However, I personally think that those "at risk families" where parents create an atmosphere that's detrimental for stydying (by being aggressive, anti-intellectual etc.) may well be worse than outright criminal ones, and I believe it'd be proven in due time.
I think leniency for violent crimes or burglary is probably misguided in at risk communities.
For most non-violent crimes, this study was unconvincing (generally speaking I’d like to see incarceration alternatives for non-violent crime, why send people to crime school at tax-payer expense?).
I agree that for these groups, there’s an elevated chance that the parent is actively harming their family. I just don’t think it would be statistically justified to separate families that aren’t criminal.
I am appalled that such an assertion can be made openly. It is, frankly, simply vile to suggest that children be taken away from struggling parents by society, rather than society being obligated to help those parents raise their children. To do so would be not only criminal, but profoundly immoral.
Facts matter. Evidence matters. We should not ignore evidence because it disagrees with our ideology. And we certainly should not attack someone for trying to bring in evidence to a discussion about something as important as raising our children.
The poster you are responding to didn't even suggest a course of action. He mearly provided evidence that the "obvious" course of action might not be so obviously correct. You are free to (as another poster did) question the relevence, interperatation, or quality of the evidence, or provide other evidence or arguments to disagree with what the poster was presenting. But you should not attack someone for trying to have an evidence based discussion.
Even if he turns out to be completely wrong, figuring out how he is wrong will likely be far more enlightening than simply asserting that he is wrong on moral grounds.
> we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart"
I don't see how that isn't a suggestion of a course of action -- one that that is a blatant misuse of a study (with small effects only measured over a small time period) toward ideological ends, i.e. supporting the seizure of children of disadvantaged parents.
Moreover, I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights. That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable, when in a civilized society they should not be.
I am not going to enter a discussion on the merits of the underlying argument because you have already acknowledged that you have no interest in doing so.
Returning to the meta discussion. Let us trace the course of the conversation in question:
neuland: ...focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it
house9-2: wouldn't it be better to support the families as they are? help improve peoples lives instead of ripping families apart
textor: For what it's worth, children from at-risk families achieve better education when the father ends up incarcerated. So we can absolutely make a case for "ripping families apart" and against supporting "families as they are".
The only proposal being made here is a voluntary foster/adoption system with encouragement. This is then framed as "ripping families apart". While this framing is arguably unfair, it is within the bounds of reason so, giving it the most charitable interpretation possible, textor responds to "ripping families apart" in the context in which it was introduced and provided evidence that keeping blood families together is not inherently the best course of action. To be clear, at this point the conversation is about how much we should be supporting voluntary adoption; and textor is arguing that the idea is not as inherantly bad as house9-2 seems to be assuming.
Stepping up a level of meta:
>I refuse to have an evidence-based discussion about whether certain people deserve human rights.
This is what political correctness looks like. Literally. You are interested in what is politically correct, evidence be dammed. Further, no one in this discussion has argued for denying people human rights. Even further, every society on the planet accepts that we can violate "human rights" in some sense for the greater good. Eg. prisons deny people their human right of freedom; taxes partially deny the right of personal property.
At risk of entering into the merits of the original discussion, leaving children in poor home environment arguably denies them their human rights, including their right to: education security of person, and food.
How do we balance these conflicting goals? With evidence to inform us what our options are and what effects they will have with regards to our goals.
Going meta again:
> one that that is a blatant misuse of a study ...
It is not a blatant misuse; it is extrapolating beyond the facts of the original study. The first step of evidence based inquiry is to work with the evidence you have. This informs the questions you can ask, so you can look for the evidence you want to have [0]. Once you've done that, you can move onto making the evidence you want to have [1]. Each step of this process provides a foundation to build the next step.
And yes, the process is not as simple as I lay out. You need theory crafting. And once your theory starts to develop holes, it may be time to revisit an earlier step until you have enough of a foundation to make the later steps worthwhile (either because your foundation is strong, is the lower tiers are short of relevant evidence)
> ... toward ideological ends,
Please take a moment to rethink who is arguing towards ideological ends. In my experience, it is generally the person arguing against the concept of evidence; not the one trying to ground themselves in evidence.
>That shifts the Overton window to present such ideas as acceptable
And what about the overton window you are moving towards. Where it is accatable to blatantly argue that evidence should be ignored. Where the very concept of introducing evidence is morally abhorant. Is that the window you want us to live in?
>when in a civilized society they should not be.
Are you arguing that the very concept of seperating children from their parents has no place in civilized society? Child Protective Services might disagree with you. They do place strong emphasis on keeping families together where possible; but they acknowledge that sometimes conditions are so bad that it is unacceptable to leave a child in that situation. Where is the line that determines what warrents CPS to remove children from their families? Again, evidence is the best approach to find it, unless you want to remove children unnecessarily while leaving others in bad situations that they would be far better off out of.
Going meta again:
The discussion is not simply two extremes. Even if we agreed that one (or both) extremes was morally untenable, by seriously exploring the benifits of it, we can look for ways to obtain those same benifits by other means: such as turning school into a 'second home', as this the content of the original article, or voluntary foster care with active involvment of the birth parents in a non-primary-guardian capacity.
[0] And by want to have, I mean the evidence that answers the questions you want to ask; not the evidence that supports the conclusion you want to reach
[1] Again, in the sense of the evidence that answers the questions you want answered.
While I appreciate your even-handed and careful defense of the point I was making, it's probably necessary to note that I didn't consider the merits of adoption at all. I have no idea what sort of policy to support on this issue. Indeed, the only thing I was objecting to was the idea of the company of biological parents being preferable by default. Given the evidence, I think that options rank like this: good parents > good foster parents > single parent > no parents > violent antisocial parent(s). Maybe it's wrong, but I don't immediately see how and believe we shouldn't assume that any position pro "ripping families apart", whatever the circumstances, is indefensible. If anything, the only policy I can responsibly advocate for, and not just voice general agreement with, is more rigorous and unbiased research into life outcomes.
Who are you to say what charitable cause a private citizen spends their money on? Do you want to complain that Bill Gates spends money trying to cure malaria rather than remove trash from the ocean too?
You have people pouring money into the school system, and the OP says it's in the wrong spot, and then the next poster asks, but who will fund that? clearly take money from one, put it in the other if that's the solution.
No, they're exaggerating. Some school funds are dependent on testing results. The better a school performs, the more funding they get from federal programs (some, not all). To say that teachers' wages are dependent on the results of these tests is just disingenuous.
> If the problem is toxic home environments though, why aren't people suggesting that we cut out the middle man and focus on building a better foster / adoption system and encouraging people to use it?
Or we could just try to fix th social problems that produce the toxic home environments rather than ripping apart the families that society has already failed.
Edit: it looks like you've been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of your politics; it's destructive of what this site exists for. Please stop doing that and use HN as intended, in the spirit of intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation. We'd appreciate it.
It's not even really that. Your home environment sets your barometer for what normal life looks like and for how strangers can be expected to behave. If your parents fight and assume ill intent in every mistake then you see that in every interaction. If they're constantly trying to get one over on each other then that's how you see human relationships. They don't have to love you or be particularly invested in you for you to learn some really screwed up lessons from them.
It is really even that. Just because it may not be logical or make sense, family bonds amd familial love are still a thing, even in families with lots of problems.
Because society is really bad at determining what is acceptable parenting. Look how popular the tiger mom bullshit is. Our foster system is also incredibly bad. It's easier to trust society in aggregate than it is to trust an individual.
Exactly. Shorter days are difficult for working parents. I'd rather my child have a reasonable learning day and then structured extra-curricular activities (even if it's just semi-organised craft, science, etc play) than making concessions at work. Not all vocations can negotiate shorter hours or part-time work without risking their employment.
And research consistently shows that teenagers perform better if you start school later in the day than 7am. E.g., http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192636502086633... "shifted the school start timefrom 7:15 a. m. to 8:40 a. m. This article examines that change, finding significant benefits such as improved attendance and enrollment rates, less sleeping in class, and less student-reported depression."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1540200070126380... "Students at the late-starting school reported waking up over 1 hr later on school mornings and obtaining 50 min more sleep each night, less sleepiness, and fewer tardies than students at the early school."
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.3.3.62 "Results show that starting the school day 50 minutes later has a significant positive effect on student achievement, which is roughly equivalent to raising teacher quality by one standard deviation."
>I Promise kids’ school days will start an hour later than their peers. They’ll also receive an additional hour after school every day called the “illumination period,” which will be a time for extra mentoring, studying or club activities.
Not only does the school day start an hour later, the extra time in the day comes from support of extracurricular activities.
>Mostly this ^. As a parent you want to get to work on time. So staggering when school starts is both good for traffic and parents’ sanity.
Part of it is the assumption that kids can't get to school on their own. I was walking by myself to school when I was 6.
And in a lot of places the built environment is such that kids really can't get to school on their own. Schools are either far away, public transit isn't possible, or there just aren't sidewalks, crosswalks, or safe routes to walk.
Fortunately the densely built areas don't have most of those problems. As long as the neighborhood kids travel in groups they're fine. And the "I Promise" program gives them their own bicycles and free rides to and from school within 2 miles.
I walked to school as I was growing up in Nairobi but realize that it’s not possible for my daughter.
Nairobi would probably have questionable security compared to the US, but I’m guessing we are probably judged quite harsh here in US.
There was just this article other day where a woman faced jail time or massive fines because she left her “not-so-baby” baby in the car. My dad used to leave us in the car all the time with windows open.
I can’t do any of that. Mostly because I may end up in jail. That’s the reality of US.
So why don't we have kids start school at 9, adults start work at 10, kids get out of school at 5 instead of 3, adults get out of work at 6 instead of 5, problem solved???
School starts are staggered so the district can use fewer buses (at least they are around here). Middle school at 7:55, High school at 8:35, Elementary at 9:20.
Here it's the opposite. Elementary starts earlier than middle school. I actually prefer this because our middle school age kid is fine to get out to the bus on her own. The elementary school twins not as much. I can leave for my train earlier this way.
Follow the money. In this case, the money is in the bus system. You only need one set of buses and drivers if you stagger school starts. Overlapping school starts means overlapping demand for buses.
The high school I went to looked into shifting the start time later because of research like this. Unfortunately, they concluded that it wasn't feasible because of after school sports -- our teams play against other high schools in the area, and the timing of that is based on when all the schools start. So if one school wants to start later, its students wouldn't be done in time for sports games and such. Pretty lame.
Longer school days help parents hold down full time jobs. A longer school year eliminates the need for babysitters or camps in the 10-12wk summer break, and also provides continuity of curriculum. Food is pretty easy and many schools are providing at least two meals already. A good number have things like backpack programs[1], also, to send food home (either in the evening or more commonly for the weekend).
A school that starts at 9am is unheard of in Germany. The standard time is 7:45am or 8:00am.
Also Ganztagsschulen (all-day schools) are getting very common (more than 60% and rising, see https://www.ganztagsschulen.org/de/19001.php). Kids stay there at until 4pm or so.
I don't know why you mention Germany in the first place, it's education system isn't top notch compared to Scandinavian schools.
For kids with unstable home environments, I think it's valuable to give them more time at school. Hopefully, the extra time includes ample opportunities for arts, sports, clubs, and other "non-academic" pursuits.
Absolutely. Most of this extra time ("wraparound time") is not necessarily structured class/tutoring time but unstructured time allowing kids to explore things like art or even play in a safe environment.
Ratios for structured play tend to be 1:8 adults to children (in UK), whilst classrooms are 1:30. Teachers are usually paid more, but not 3½ times more.
NSPCC recommend 1:6 ratio for 4-8 year olds doing activities.
I'd say max 1:3 if you want to give parent level care engaging with a child in activities the child is choosing in a meaningful way.
I believe it also depends on the environment around the school. In a third-world country, I'd probably prefer being safely indoors at school and in contact with friends, with free time if needed, than in a sketchy area without being able to see many friends. In a rich European country, there's enough public infrastructure (public transport, libraries, parks, etc.) that I'd probably prefer to be outside.
> In a third-world country, I'd probably prefer being safely indoors at school
That's a ridiculous generalization. Most developing countries have lower crime rates than some American inner cities. Heck, many developing countries are safer than some developed countries.
You absolutely cannot compare Northern Europe with inner-city black America. Different worlds, different values, different histories, different attitudes, different challenges. No model fits all, especially in education, but these two realities are so dramatically different that they don’t really belong in the same sentence.
Agreed. Using Finland as an example is absurd. Finland has a very wealthy, very homogeneous population. Longer school days are designed, in this case, to keep many of these kids in a safe environment for as long as possible.
Finland has a drastically lower poverty rate, lower income inequality [1] and lower violent crime rate than the United States [2].
This fact, combined with Finland's well-known social safety nets leads to the obvious conclusion that you would be hard pressed to find living conditions like those in the slums of Akron/Cleveland in Finland.
==This fact, combined with Finland's well-known social safety nets leads to the obvious conclusion that you would be hard pressed to find living conditions like those in the slums of Akron/Cleveland in Finland.==
Isn't it possible that Finland's well-known social safety net is at least partially responsible for the lower poverty, income inequality and violent crime rates?
It's absolutely the case, no question; but the problem here is that a school model that works in that scenario is unlikely to work in the current American scenario. It's like writing programs for high-level APIs (that will take care of memory, sorting and so on) versus writing programs against the POSIX interface (where you have to basically do everything yourself).
Yes, and I absolutely agree with the the other reply that such a model would be completely ineffective in the type of neighborhoods LeBron's school is targeting. I hope this model is successful because I think it could greatly benefit under-served communities.
I don't know this to be true or false, but is there any evidence of it? And is there any evidence that it has an effect on educational effectiveness? I wouldn't expect an effect; people learn to read, write and do math in K-12 all over the world.
They also have policies in place to support parents at the beginning of a child's life (i.e. the most important developmental phase of life). They also have a lower GDP per capita and somehow still afford all of these benefits that we are continually told would bankrupt our country. Truly a country of "family values".
- New child leave - Expecting mothers in Finland can start their maternity leave seven weeks before their estimated due date. After that the government covers 16 additional weeks of paid leave through a maternity grant, regardless of whether the mother is a student, unemployed, or self-employed. The country also offers eight weeks of paid paternity leave. - https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-with-best-parental...
- Partial Care Leave - After a child turns three, parents may take partial care leave, meaning, you can work fewer hours per day or week in order to spend more time with your child — and though you can’t take partial care leave at the same time, both the father and the mother can take the partial care leave at a different times. This innovative leave lasts until the end of the child’s second school year. - https://inhabitat.com/inhabitots/finlands-family-benefits-pr...
Indeed, Finland is a model state in so many ways. That is why they can do with schools stuff that likely won't fit the immediate needs of inner-city US minorities: Finns can have short school times because parents have flexible working arrangements, generous subsidies, free healthcare and so on. Finnish kids go home to solid families that can make time for them without sacrificing their wealth; American kids go home to parents who are overworked, absent, or even addicted -- especially the poorer ones. In that situation, it's much better to keep them in school doing activities for as long as possible.
To be honest, you don't even have to go as far as the US, there are very similar issues in European banlieues and the likes. Long school hours used to be a typical postwar demand of progressive worker-rights movements, because it freed parents (especially women) to pursue career advancement and focused kids on academic achievement. I am a product of that sort of system, myself: from the age of 6 to the age of 12, I would be in school from 8:30am to 4:30pm, 5 days a week - plus an optional extra hour at both ends because my parents couldn't pick me up sooner. Unfortunately, after the social regression of the last 20 years, that kind of system is slowly disappearing in Europe too, and for all the bad reasons (cost-cutting).
> You absolutely cannot compare Northern Europe with inner-city black America.
Bad schools are throughout the United States, especially in poor areas, of which predominantly African-American regions make up only one part.
Also, while the parent's claim is a common excuse for inaction and lack of funding, I have yet to see any basis for it. While every case is different, we can all learn from others.
My working theory is, it is context dependent if longer school days, and terms are better or worse.
For example: With Children that have a rich home environment, plenty of interactions that stimulate them, keeping them at school longer may hamper development.
On the flip side you have an environment where this is not the case. Examples include socio-economic factors like parents/care givers working long hours.
I recently did research into this exact problem in South Africa. What are the factors that impact on education in communities that have socio-economic challenges?
The challenges are numerous and as this article says. The environment around the children just makes it extremely difficult for them to break out of the cycle of poverty.
These factors include:
being hungry,
crime,
lack of sanitation-this is a problem in South Africa they get sick more often then their counterparts in other areas.This results in them missing more school which puts them behind.,
Parents working long hours, travelling distances to get to work
Lack of resources in schools or support
There really is a multitude of problems each impacting the other creating a self perpetuating cycle of poverty.
Out of the research into the problems I developed a concept for a social enterprise that could solve some of these problems.
Trying to identify some funding sources as traditional vc will not be suitable. Maybe impact investors?
If the above sounds interesting, you are keen to explore leveraging education for social change or exploring alternative educational models mail me. Email is in profile
If the kids we're coming from stable, supportive home environments where learning can take place outside the classroom, you might be right. But those aren't the target students for the program; IMO the student's from rough home lives will almost assuredly benefit from this model.
> If the kids we're coming from stable, supportive home environments where learning can take place outside the classroom, you might be right.
The entire point of the finnish model is that this doesn't happen, there is no homework and there is no suggestion or expectations of parental teaching. There is extensive support for both kids and their parents (including good free meals and teacher-provided tutoring), but all teaching is done by the teacher.
For lower socioeconomic status kids a stable environment means not being at school at 6 am because Mom kicked you out to 'party' with her new boyfriend, or not coming to school high because Dad hotboxed on the drive over.
If people can't get their shit together enough to make sure their kid has a sandwich everyday they certainly aren't putting their kid into boarding school. Parents found unfit for parenting have their kids placed in the foster system, but that is a lengthy legal process.
> If people can't get their shit together enough to make sure their kid has a sandwich everyday they certainly aren't putting their kid into boarding school.
If that's the good public school of the area why wouldn't they?
I think the point is that school is safer and provides better nourishment than the students own home, considering the low-poverty and crime-ridden areas some - or even many - of the students live at.
Both those countries are also very prosperous and innovative. It seems the people or culture are what makes them do so well not the amount of school hours.
For all we know parents in those countries are far more supportive of their children. And may also be intelligent enough to assist their children with the homework. By intelligent I mean they are able to teach their children well I don't mean to be able to understand what a six year-old is learning (if not there is a far bigger problem!).
The longer school day and it's structure are, per the article, designed to provide compensation for at-home support that is deficient in the target population; done right—e.g., so it doesn't just look like normal classroom time stretched longer—this may well be the best available mitigation for the social problem it is addressing.
I was one of the lucky kids who went to a very well funded school district because my parents managed to snag one of the, like, 15 housing units within it that didn't cost a million dollars a year to live in.
They had a really good after-school program for me and the other 30 or so kids whose parents had to work long hours with no flexibility. We were supervised by an adult to make sure we didn't kill each other but it was mostly about having free-time to do homework, read books, and play pick-up soccer or whatever.
Edit: To be honest, it's probably a better environment that we would have gotten at home, even with caring, attentive parents. We had access to the whole school library and our adult supervision actually knew our curricula so they could help us with the homework better than our parents could. Home computers weren't really a thing yet, so being able to use the shelf of encyclopedias was huge.
> There's really solid evidence that increasing classroom time increases learning.
There's really solid evidence that intellectual performance drops sharply long before 40h/week. Unless the "classroom time" you talk about includes a lot of off-time and non-butt-in-seat activities it seems you'll be deep into diminishing returns if not outright losing if you increase the length of the school day. My own memories of schools are that by late afternoon many students had stopped following altogether.
As long as you pay teachers overtime for all the extra hours they'll be working to put together curriculum for your longer school days, I'm in. It's not just students who have to be working during those hours, it's also teachers.
Longer school days might help kids with stressful home environment but it also poses risk to bonding b/w kids and parents especially for parents who are able to provide and are working towards holistic(moral, etc.) development of their kids. Longer school days should be optional with extra curricular activities to fill the later part of the day.
your example doesn't contradict the idea of having a longer school day or school year. as others have said, kids who lack a nurturing home environment can benefit from a nurturing environment at school (if that's what it truly is).
for example, school could open at 6am for parents who work early, but not start until 9am. the intermediary time could be nap time, unstuctured play, or guided exploration (gardening, science experiments, even animal husbandry in rural areas). between structured classroom time, they could have more breaks for more naps, play or exploration. school could end later so parents can pick them up after work, and have shorter and more frequent vacations so kids don't forget so much in-between.
you could even have morning or evening joint learning times, where parents join in to learn how to teach and encourage their kids (such programs seem to help break the cycle of poverty).
> a longer school year helps students stay focused
My kids (4th and 7th) attend a school with a year-round schedule, and we (kids and parents) love it:
* They are less stressed because there is more breaks throughout the year. Teachers seem less stressed, too, because they don't have to pack so much in.
* They retain more in the summer.
* Outside of academics: it's really nice to have the option to take longer vacations outside of spring break and summer break.
I'd love to see more schools move to it... 3 months off in summer seems very antiquated in hindsight.
This is definitely the norm in the US. Maybe it's not quite 3 full months, closer to 2 1/2, but there's a long enough gap that time is wasted refreshing information from the previous year.
Growing up in Upstate NY, I always assumed part of it was also due to the fact that breaks during the winter basically translate to hours spent cooped-up inside, watching TV or playing on the computer.
I know that the 3-month summer break stems from historical harvest/planting schedules... but when there's 20 inches of snow outside and the wind chill is -10 F, I'll take 3 months of summer vacay over 6 weeks of summer and 6 weeks of winter breaks any day.
The summer break is also often when the weather is the hottest. Many schools don't have air conditioning, but would need it to provide a conducive learning environment in the heat of the summer. A schedule change combined with a few degrees of climate change turns a few rather hot days a school year into weeks of being too hot to learn.
I grew up north of Edmonton (regular -40f for several weeks), and would have loved a 6 week winter break. Outdoor hockey & cross country skiing, snowshoeing, downhill skiing. I know I would have been out on the rink every day.
Just occurred to me, as "heat waves" become the norm for longer periods of time, I'm sure there will be people arguing for the cost-savings of not having to cool the school buildings during the summer.
In contrast I'm very happy with long Summer holidays at present. It gives us chance to spend extended periods together as a family and to help our children to follow their own educational goals rather than those dictated by central government. We're planning electronics, modern language learning, weir building, insect hunting, camping, outdoor pursuits, ... none of which they do in school here.
One nice thing about 3 month summer is the ability to get a temporary job. When I was in high school I worked every summer as a landscaper/food service/lifeguard/etc. and gained lots of experience/money I otherwise wouldn't have gotten. With year round school that doesn't seem possible.
Definitely. I probably wouldn't have been able to have done internships over the summer with year-round school. And, at least in my case, the internship(s) led to a full-time job at the same place years later.
places definitely don't want to expend resources hiring someone for three weeks just to have them leave, then come back, in a cycle. they want 3 months all in a row.
Others fall asleep immediately at school since they live with 5+ siblings and there are literally no available beds at home. I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either
At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play. Having 5+ children when you have no resources... this is the true elephant in the room. It seems talking about it gets labels thrown around. I guess it's a conversation we can't have right now, though.
I've thought about this a lot over the years, as someone coming from a poor background but grew up around very wealthy kids, I never understood why people who cannot afford to give their child a good life have children. That may sound cold, and it might be, but I wondered it myself growing up in a poor household.
There's a great scene from a Michael Winterbottom movie called Jude where --spoiler-- a child asks his parents why they had him if they could not afford him and his siblings. The child doesn't like the answer and ends up hanging himself and his siblings.
I don't know if there is a solution. People want to have kids, even if they can't - in my opinion - afford them. Some religions encourage having lots of children - it's a big thing in the catholic community, at least where I grew up.
Anecdote: My cousin is married to a catholic latina, he's already struggling to make ends meet taking care of the one kid they have. He lives with her grandparents and cousins in a tiny apartment in a low income neighborhood. There is no way I could talk him out of having another child, even though I know it's fiscally irresponsible in my opinion.
I think it's a conversation worth having but I just don't know how it can go anywhere, and I have struggled to come up with an answer that isn't just me being upset with the parents.
> Are you suggesting we make their parents "pay" somehow? Or a program to prevent the parents from having 5+ kids when they don't have the resources?
Due to the way government assistance is structured it encourages parents to 1) not get married, 2) have more kids, 3) not begin working if they don't already work.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents getting married that would help reduce fatherlessness and all of the negatives that come with that.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have.
If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to work it would reduce the number of people who grow up on government assistance and live on it their whole lives. This would have long term positive consequences.
"If we changed government assistance to encourage parents getting married that would help reduce fatherlessness and all of the negatives that come with that."
That's not really a good idea. I know my godson's parents, and if they getting assistance was reliant on getting married, they would end up killing each other.
"If we changed government assistance to encourage parents to have less children they would be better able to take care of the ones they have."
How, exactly would you do this? And do it without punishing the kids by leaving their parents with even fewer resources?
Currently as a single mother, you can qualify for more things than you can as a married mother. This puts a financial incentive to stay unmarried. This incentive should be removed.
I don't have as good of an answer for reducing children. It would probably be best to work on reducing the number of children by providing easier access to birth control.
"Currently as a single mother, you can qualify for more things than you can as a married mother. This puts a financial incentive to stay unmarried. This incentive should be removed."
You're completely and utterly ignoring the fact that raising children, especially multiple ones, is an extremely difficult task, even for two people. I know of very few people who would opt to do it themselves, even if the financial incentives to do so were worth it (they aren't even close).
You're completely and utterly ignoring the fact that raising children, especially multiple ones, is an extremely difficult task, even for two people. I know of very few people who would opt to do it themselves, even if the financial incentives to do so were worth it (they aren't even close).
I just want to point out there are a lot of poor women raising significant numbers of children. The woman next to my mom has 5-7 (it's hard to tell, and she just had a new one). They father (of some of them) is around a little, but mostly not around. And it looks like there are several fathers. Yes, raising children well is hard, but I would not describe what this woman does as difficult. Older kids are raising the younger ones, etc, etc.
So, I would definitely disagree with your assertion.
I think this is a huge part of it. Even something as simple as free high-quality condoms or emergency contraception (morning-after) can make a huge difference when money is tight.
Even better would be free birth-control medication or IUD's, as these put the birth control in the hands of women, while condoms especially might not be used in the face of social pressure.
I like the assumption that the 5+ kids are all just due to irresponsible people popping children out and not, say, the results of generous people fostering family members who would be in even worse situations otherwise or a mother who is being raped by a partner.
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask: Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.
What, besides providing extra resources to underpriveleged children so they are not punished for their parents mistakes, can be done?
Unintended consequences. I believe it is generally accepted that the policies in the 70's led to the destruction (dismantling?) of the urban/poor family (yes, predominately African American).
Also, we've seen that this issue has significantly fueled the rise of people like our current POTUS.
It's a hard problem. I don't know what the solution is.
> I believe it is generally accepted that the policies in the 70's led to the destruction (dismantling?) of the urban/poor family (yes, predominately African American).
These problems existed long before then. For example, a famous and controversial report from 1965:
The problems are largely due to systematic oppression of African-American people for generations, denying them access to adequate housing, education, income, credit, access to legal protections, and exposing them to risks of violence by the state and by white people.
Which policies of the 70s and 80s contributed and where is evidence of that? I ask because I try to be careful to distinguish between oft-repeated narratives and hypotheses with actual evidence.
Who's responsibility? Not the child's. This school is about helping the children who weren't given a say in the matter of their upbringing and existence.
Why not both? Treat the symptom, getting help for these at-risk kids and work on the cause: figure out how to not get into this situation with all these at-risk kids to begin with. For some reason you can only talk about seatbelts—mentioning safe driving will get you downvotes.
Helping at-risk kids succeed is helping treat the cause. If you don't help these kids, they're going to grow up and have their own "at-risk" kids. And the cycle continues. These are efforts to break the cycle. This is proactive investment in the future.
> Having 5+ children when you have no resources...
Isn't that surprising; globally, number of children goes down with both prosperity and, even controlling for prosperity, strength of social safety nets (a common explanation for the latter being that with no or weak public safety net, your children are your old-age social safety net.)
The US has been proudly dismantling it's social safety net since the 1990s, and it already was notoriously weak for the developed world. Simultaneously, access to birth control and abortion is also under perennial assault, and even where access is maintained, well-funded shame campaigns are directed against both.
Strangely, the people backing all of those efforts are also the ones that complain the most about poor people having too many kids. And do so under the banner of “personal responsibility”, without any hint of intentional irony.
Someone might argue that people shouldn't engage in activities that have a strong probability of creating responsibilities they can't handle, no matter how good those initial activities feel.
In other parts of society we'd say "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
I know this is a very unpopular opinion the world over right now, but: This applies loosely to sex as well (Don't have sex if you can't afford to have kids).
No, it sounds like you're arguing that the child should bear the burden of the parent's bad decisions. Ever hear the phrase "sins of the father?"
The fact is the child has no control over their home environment, and you're effectively damning them to a life of lower achievement based on the fact that their parents can't afford enough bedding. Is that really the kind of world you want to live in?
A parents lack of self/impulse control shouldn't be the child's responsibility. And we should strive as much as possible to prevent people from doing something that might cause that to be the case. Obviously once a child is born we need to work on making sure they have a bright and fulfilling future, but why not stop it at the source?
Wow. So asking someone for a bit of self control and being a responsible adult is now considered an unreasonable request. Because it’s so difficult to at least not have unprotected sex when you know you’re not in a position to support a child.
Saying that someone should lose all support, as the person I was responding to suggested, just for doing one of the normal human acts is entirely unreasonable.
Depends if you're being pedantic and talking about sex-vs-no-sex rather than protected sex. There are loads of achievable and affordable options including freely available and/or subsidised contraception, practical sex education, down the spectrum towards abortion, etc.
Self control is unreasonable? You honestly sound like those creepy men who go around slapping random coworker's behinds because that's what comes naturally.
> I know this is a very unpopular opinion the world over right now, but: This applies loosely to sex as well (Don't have sex if you can't afford to have kids).
because it's a ridiculous opinion that ignores human nature and provides awful advice.
It doesn't ignore human nature, it asks that you embrace your humanity. Until recently people would have argued that "unwanted advances" were "human nature." NO! As an adult human you're better than that. Control yourself.
I'm not really understanding why it provides "awful advice"? Why should your children bear the responsibilities of your lack of self control?
I do wish that this comment could serve as the banner comment for this post. It's such an immature response to assume that because you're taking responsibility to resolve or address something that it implies that you're to blame for it having occurred in the first place.
This mentality is pervasive in the elementary and middle schools that my kids attend and it's unfortunate that adults haven't grown out of it. Thank you for your comment.
True leadership says that we need to work toward fixing the problem, while selfish ambition says, "not my fault, not my problem."
> True leadership says that we need to work toward fixing the problem, while selfish ambition says, "not my fault, not my problem."
The sad reality is that in the other hand, thanks to the ever present tragedy of the commons, there are selfish people that take advantage of this thinking "someone will fix it, doesn't matter if I contribute to the problem for my own benefit".
I understand and appreciate your perspective on this. However, I'm not certain that those of us who are "haves" or who are privileged in some way can put the majority of the burden on those who are "have-nots" to simply stop what they're doing and wait for change. If the goal of our lives is to protect what we have, then I have a feeling that we're going to die with unfulfilled lives - we just may not know it until it's too late.
I didn't mean to say people who aren't directly responsible should shrug their shoulders and move on. I have this discussion with my wife often. How the hell do you help kids who have little to no support structure at home?
Our federal and local governments often make it harder for these people, and I'm all for fixing that (with my notion of what a "fix" looks like of course.) That's not the entire story though; how do you make fathers stick around? How do you solve for poverty? You don't, at least, we have never been able to do so, and now you get into philosophical territory about whether or not that's even possible.
My issue is that I have no idea how to fix it. Pumping more money into low income schools is not a cure-all. Don't get me wrong, it can help, but we have many cases where it made little to no difference because teachers and iPads can't do it all.
Anyways, that's a lot of rambling. My point is that I don't think the sentiment of "these people are oppressed" (which is what I assume most mean when they say it's "society's fault") is correct. It's far more complicated than that.
> At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play.
It actually doesn't. Everyone is a responsible as they're capable of being, given their genetics and their environment. If you're a very responsible person it's because you were fortunate to have your particular genetics and/or environment.
Some people are born into terrible environments but have the genetic luck to be highly responsible. Some people are born into great environments but have the genetic misfortune to be highly irresponsible.
No one chooses to be responsible or irresponsible.
The onus is on the genetically/environmentally lucky people to help the unlucky ones. There's absolutely no shame in being unlucky and no pride in being lucky. There isn't much the lucky people can do to improve genetics (yet) but there's a lot that can be done to improve environments.
Not just genetics. Your willpower is entirely dependent on your genetics and your environment. There are no other factors possible. No one chooses how much willpower they have, just like no one chooses how intelligent they are.
By your argument if somebody is lucky, successful, and prideful, but feels no desire to help others, wouldn't that apathy also be a result of genetics and environment? And thus you couldn't blame them for it or expect them to act any differently.
Exactly. You can certainly pity someone for lacking empathy but blaming them makes no sense.
And behavior isn't necessarily a static thing. This same person might read a good book (which would become part environment) which might move them to be more empathetic.
how do you see people not taking personal responsibility in this regard? at an individual, or a population level?
you seem to assume a lot about people "having 5+ children when you have no resources". even the idea of "no resources" has a number of in-built assumptions. what are they? do you work with populations of people like this? do you personally know people in this situation? are they truly hopeless?
certainly we can have an adult conversation, but don't beat around the bush. start the conversation with an earnest and reasoned argument, rather than an inscrutable lament.
Along with "out-of-wedlock" births people also get divorced and/or die. I know two families where death is what caused a parent to become single. Life changes quickly (I grew up with a single mom, she got divorced because my dad developed a severe mental illness). Judging families by personal responsibility should really only be done on a case-by-case basis.
Of course personal responsibility comes into play. But what do you want to do about it? The child already exists and we can't go back in time, so no preventing that. Do we give the child the best opportunity it can get, or somehow use it to punish the parents for their decision making?
You're getting downvoted, and maybe most of that is a sentiment of "we have to deal with the problem at hand", which is absolutely the only thing an outsider can do, but you're not wrong.
My wife works in a low income school, largest and poorest in the area (a relatively large city.) Pumping more money in does not help. More after school problems does not help much. As far as academic achievement is concerned, these kids are completely stuck because they have what we would consider terrible situations at home.
Sometimes the parents just don't care, sometimes they just don't have the time (multiple jobs). More often than not there is only one parent at home. There's only so much a teacher/school can do if the parent is picking up the ball when the kid gets home.
I come from one of those large, poor inner city schools. The money and after school programs absolutely help. I am a product of those after school programs. That additional money paid for musical instruments, sports, computers, and transportation.
I feel personally insulted when people say we shouldn't fund these afterschool programs because they don't feel they are working.
Having a good plan and the resources to execute is what works.
I know it sounds like I'm talking about a minor difference, but I think it's a lot bigger than that. You can add more money to a lot of the broken systems in the US. It helps, but it doesn't fix core problems and the systems are still incredibly inefficient.
Anecdotal experiences are near worthless when discussing policies, though. Feel insulted all you like; statistically speaking, these resources are wasted. Chances are you'd be equally well off without them.
There's no reason to assume that they work to begin with; pretty much nothing ever does in education. But you can examine the failure of Head Start and the general trends in education costs vs. results to see that the room for improvement is largely used up.
It's not all about personal responsibility. Something to also consider is that the psychology of poverty also drives bad decisions [1]. Turns out the financial pressures that drive people to make bad decisions are also some of the pressures the I promise school is trying to alleviate.
Of course, the parent could have also been very responsible. Maybe they were married with a nice income. Fast forward 10 years and their spouse has died or went to prison and they lost their nice job and now have to work multiple lower paying jobs. There are a multitude of circumstances that could put you in a position that you didn't foresee.
"At some point, though, personal responsibility has to come into play."
Only if you're looking to blame something so you can feel smugly superior to them. If you're looking to actually provide services or improve conditions, that's not something worth talking about, because it doesn't change conditions now.
EDIT: And especially not when we're talking about Ohio, which is one of the states looking to outright ban abortion.
> I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either, a lot of the time there are single parents just trying to get by and make ends meet and don't know what more they can do.
If there is a household with one parent, 5+ children, and not enough beds for them, the problem has occurred long before. One cannot blame the parent for "that day", but certainly the adult bears some responsibility for creating such a household. Having 5 kids without planning for beds, or income, or stability, is a decision SOMEONE made. It doesn't just "happen" like weather. There is human responsibility here.
In my view, "I Promise" is making up for those mistakes. Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.
Why should we be clear about that? You know it is just turtles all the way down right? The goal here is to break a _cycle_ which this school is hopefully going to do by focusing constructively on what works to help these kids be better parents themselves one day. Beyond deepening our understanding of helping these kids I'd actually argue scrutinizing the parents has only negative utility and should be avoided at all costs (unless vilifying poor/uneducated parents feels useful to you as an end unto itself).
Life is full of much more complicated scenarios. A friend of mine recently passed away from cancer. Her 2 kids will now go live with someone else, who already have kids of their own, and are now taking on a very significant financial burden that they could not have planned for. How would you view this family that suddenly has more kids than they can afford?
Some things actually do just "happen", like weather.
The problem with pinning responsibility on that parent is, the original decision that led to this situation may predate the parent. Maybe they were raised by a single mom with many siblings and not enough resources too. Maybe they live somewhere deeply conservative where contraception isn't taught about. To act like the parent is wholly responsible is unrealistic and naive.
They are responsible though. Unless you want to take away decision making power from a person.
This realization does not have to incur any sort of "well you deserve this outcome and sucks to be you" sort of logic, however. It is the parent's fault for creating the situation, but society can choose to bail one out for poor decision making.
My situation is probably drastically determined by some stranger 200 years ago who decided hopping in a pile of potatoes on barge headed for the US was a good idea. Thank you distant relative, that was a genius idea!
The point isn't to act like people aren't responsible for their own actions, of course they are. The point is to be realistic about how much of our situations are attributable to our personal decision making. People don't exist in small vacuums where they control everything.
And that stranger 200 years ago made a decision somehow. Most african-american people in the context of this thread are descendants of enslaved individuals brought to this continent against their will.
Ohio (where this school is) lacks quality sex education and access to abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching at all about contraception. Ohio law allows parents to block their kids from having an abortion. Ohio law doesn't require teaching students about consent.
So there is a huge swath of people in Ohio schools who are totally uneducated about sex. Certainly SOME of the blame should go to the decision of the Ohio legislature to withhold information about birth control from students.
> Its a good thing, but let's be clear about why it's valuable.
It's valuable because the American Right has been making a sustained and successful attack on the integrity, stability, and viability of poor families for at least three decades (and other powerful forces, whose modern incarnation is also part of the American Right, has been doing so to families of color, who are disproportionately poor, since America was colonized.)
It is true that addressing that cause is useful in thinking about more complete, comprehensive long-term solutions.
Isn't it possible that "income, or stability" experienced a sudden drastic change at some point after birthing the 5th kid? It is conceivable that the parent did not have full control over that change.
They made the choice to have the first, second, third, and fourth kid before the fifth one. Each child is a huge lifelong expense: everyone knows this fact. Condoms, birth control, abortions: these are all available tools to give people control over human reproduction.
And you can be completely fine and have plenty of resources for all 5 kids until your wife gets cancer and you drop 1 million dollars of medical expenses into that money pit and then she dies anyway. Now you have 5 kids, single income, and way less than no money.
Strangers on the internet say it’s your fault.
Enjoy
Well I guess it’s your fault for having kids in a country with scant social safety nets. So you’re kinda right
But birth control, condoms, and abortions are NOT given as a tool to most young people in America. Looking at Ohio specifically (where Jordan's school is),
Schools don't have to tell kids that birth control exists, let alone show them how to properly use a condom (which is a non-trivial skill: condoms are 98% effective when put on properly but 85% effective in real life)
Schools don't have to tell kids abortion exists. Even if kids did know, their parents can block them from getting an abortion. Also, getting an abortion requires traveling to a clinic, which often requires a car.
This is such a privileged view point... And I don't even like that word. But really, the idea that someone shouldn't have kids unless they have their entire life planned? Unless they have a stable (jobs | spouses | families | friends | environment | culture) that can be relied on? Not everyone has that opportunity. And it sounds very much like victim blaming to then tell them that they should be denied having kids because their life isn't perfectly stable. And let's be very, brutally honest: It's not like stable households don't also occasionally produce broken children. Incidence rate is dropped, but decidedly not zero.
I mean, hell, I have an extremely stable job at an extremely stable company. And I still fear losing my job, and the effect that would have on my family!
Ok let's be clear about that. Now what? There _is_ a household with one parent and 5+ children. Unless you have a time machine you can't undo that. What do you do about that household? Telling the parents that they made bad decisions actually doesn't do much to help the children. How do you help the children?
Right, and the best way to fix that problem is by taking away easy access to contraceptives and eliminating sexual education from schools. And while we're at it let's overturn Roe vs. Wade.
If we just pray a little harder, people will stop having kids! Teenagers will stop having sex! Condoms will stop breaking!
From what I read it seems he's focusing on the pain points or barriers to learning from the perspective of the underprivileged from whence LeBron came. If you have someone that lived this giving him deep insight to the real issues AND he's a good person AND he has power to change, that is a fabulous formula for success. I hope this works out. Too many times you have people meaning well that have not actually experienced the life of the subjects being helped and you end up with wrong-fit solutions. We can all understand this as coders when we build something thinking this is how users will use it and then find out no, that's not the case.
I'm not convinced this 'diversity of thought' (aka direct domain expertise) is actually as useful as people love to claim these days. It's an extremely popular narrative that gets pushed with very little questioning or measuring of its utility.
a) is it really accurate that a smart person can't legitimately learn and be sensitive to life experiences from others or b) why can't they hire people to advise them while still managing the project themselves?
This sounds like a solvable problem by promoting being sympathetic and deferential, rather than replacing people outright from the process simply because they aren't 'from' that group. It's just as likely the people with the life experience don't have the other skills for managing or running a project as well.
Everyone is acting like this project is already a success when it has just launched...Id wait a couple years before calling LeBron a hero.
Bill Gates for example, does extensive research with many experts in the field trying to pinpoint actual barriers or issues that real people experience prior to coming up with problem and solution scenarios. My statement takes nothing away from that, rather, it is a good starting point to have this inside knowledge at the core to tackle real world issues effectively.
>>> Everyone is acting like this project is already a success when it has just launched...Id wait a couple years before calling LeBron a hero.
Although I agree with your general point, I don't see the problem with praising people that is trying hard at changing the lives of others for the better.
Yes useful in advisory role, ie interviewing subjects throughout the process, particularly getting their feedback/input during research, product development, and design would be extremely valuable. Which is quite distinct from this idea that entrepreneurs, leaders, and employees internal must be 'diverse' themselves in odder for projects to succeed.
What should matter first is the team members skill/talent relevant to the project. While also hiring sympathic people who go out in the field to get feedback and interview subjects to determine the problems needing solving,+gýg environment factors, attitudes, etc.
look at zuck’s $100M to the new jersey school system. just lob money over the wall, hoping for results with absolutely no understanding of how to have sustainable impact.
Are you saying this failed do to a lack of diversity or his lack of involvement of relevant people directly familiar with the problem at hand... Or what exactly?
Throwing money at a project without strong, involved leadership can be ineffective and fail, or for a variety of other reasons, regardless of his or the members diversity.
why the skepticism and negativity around this arguably good deed? he is stepping in to help people. what’s the issue here? why the downplay of the initiative?
This "normal public school" line is bizarre to me. Yes, it's a part of the school district. But it accepts specific students and has its own expanded curriculum.
No doubt! I definitely don't mean to denigrate the project at all, it's an incredibly philanthropic move by LeBron and he deserves every ounce of the praise he's been getting.
I just see a lot of people using the "public school" line as a cudgel to bash charter schools, but charter schools are exactly the mechanism to accomplish something like this for people who aren't revered/rich enough to exercise the kind of influence over their hometown that LeBron did to get them to agree to incorporate novel facilities and practices directly into their district.
Charter schools are wonderful, if the state's laws are well written. I'm in Minnesota, and my kids went to charters for seven years, (six at a project-oriented school that targeted students with learning or social problems in mainstream schools). But it works here because the system is completely fair - any student can attend any school, and there are no good mechanisms for private charters, or for charters that exclude students by type. Many of the charters are actually sponsored by school districts - for example, Minneapolis has dedicated bilingual charters for the large Somali and Spanish-speaking populations.
Then I see the consequences of bad law in other states, and I just cringe.
Regular public schools are limited to the curriculum prescribed by their school boards and generally can't deviate or experiment much. They're also, by definition, limited to students in a specific geographical area rather than any selection criteria. As others have noted, this goes both ways - charter/magnet schools can choose to serve the highest aptitude students (as most do), but they can also choose to serve at-risk or academically challenged students as this one does.
No explicit reason, they just generally don't. When you're beholden to voters or a city council, your job is least threatened when you don't rock the boat. If you do rock it, you better make sure you're right or it's not likely to end well for you. Meanwhile, your 'subjects' are unwitting participants who thought they'd be getting a normal education, not early adopters explicitly willing to try something new. All of these factors discourage experimentation.
Non-charter/magnet publicly funded schools cannot select/reject children based on their demographics or aptitude. The most they can do is have a preference based on locality or the presence of a sibling in the school - which can and does introduce its own selection bias.
Ultimately, the public school system has to serve students who have been excluded from more selective schools, otherwise you end up as a society where the most basic education is a privilege instead of a right.
If you can select students who come from more better environments (magnet/charter schools), you don't need to spend a considerable amount of resources to manage/treat the social issues that accompany students from worse environments. The latter is what public schools that serve poorer communities have to deal with.
Unless you're using an unorthodox definition of 1% (e.g. 1% of demonstrated academic ability), you're mistaken. Rich people can afford to send their kids to private schools or live in economically segregated areas with high-performing schools. Charter schools do not charge tuition, making them available to the masses.
However, they often do exclude those who don't have parents actively demanding more for their children, those who perform poorly on standardized tests due to adverse home factors rather than innate ability, or those with special needs such schools aren't equipped to support.
In my state the magnet schools work exactly the opposite. They put magnet programs in underperforming schools in the hopes that bringing in a bunch of high achievers will be a rising tide or something.
I have no idea what the effectiveness is in my state, whether success is contagious to underperforming students or not. Either way it will be interesting to see how this inverted philosophy of magnet schools performs in comparison.
Magnets were developed to alleviate segregation through social engineering. Underprivilege and at-risk tends to go hand in hand with these circumstances. In states where this was less of an issue they may have been adopted as a way to have an "elite" public school but that isn't their typical application.
wow, the linked related article about NYC school segregation was depressing: https://www.vox.com/2016/2/16/10980856/new-york-city-schools...
especially the part about charters having two times during the year when low-performing students are forced out into the public school: one in October after per-student funding is allocated to the school, allowing them to grab the funding while pushing a now-unfunded student onto the public school, and again in Spring right before standardized testing, when they can weed out the ones who did poorly on prep tests. Seems like the city/state should step in and disallow this practice.
the lie perpetuated through the decades that segregation was a Southern thing may never really truly come to light as people really are shy on learning things they don't want to believe. the laws to stop it were written to block any attempts to desegregate Northern schools, or more to the point NYC
In related news, RAND just finished its study of the Gates Foundation's "Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative".
RAND found that "With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate".
It's refreshing to see a holistic approach to helping at-risk students, instead of assuming that teachers are the most important component. Good nutrition, safe transport to school, and support for parents all seem like ideas that should be more experimented with.
It's great to see superstars like LeBron doing something like this. Say what you want about him as a player but you cant knock him as a philanthropist.
I'm not a fan boy or anything but he's a rather remarkable person. To take advantage of the biological attributes he was given and work insanely hard to maximize them from a young age. All while not being distracted by all the other things that could lead to squandering his natural talents. And then not relying just on those but enhancing them through dedication and discipline.
Then you throw in all the pressure he had as a youth to be the next big thing and then going to the NBA and succeeding immediately in terms of personal ability.
Yes, he had that PR blunder when he left Cleveland but he had good reason to - he just took bad advice and went about it wrong. But he proved his point and then came back home and helped win a championship for his hometown team.
All this while remaining super charismatic, not falling into bad habits or getting involved in scandals. Being a good father and marrying his high school sweetheart whom he has 3 children with.
Doing things for the community that aren't vapid or short term PR grabs. But really trying to make a difference.
All the while coming from a very disadvantaged place economically and without his father around.
He's by all accounts a savvy and smart businessman and hasn't blown it like so many people with rags to riches stories. He has kept his good friends around and integrated them into his businesses in ways that make sense. He appears to show true loyalty to those that were with him before he became what he is today.
He's well spoken and thoughtful on top of it all.
I don't follow his sport much but he is a person who appears to just be exceptional in many ways. He just seems so genuine and without the veneer that other stars really suffer from. Granted he has a massive PR team and marketing team but it would have been so easy to have a slip-up. It would have been easy to make bad business decisions and it would have been easy to find new "friends" and women and all the other things that are short term. But he has a goal larger than being an NBA star and he's stuck with it.
I agree. To have someone like LeBron as the face of the NBA is fantastic. As a sports fan I hate the guy (Thank god he moved to the western conference) but as a human, I think he is an incredible role model and force for good in this country.
Compare from the article: "I Promise will feature longer school days, a non-traditional school year, and greater access to the school, its facilities, and its teachers during down time for students. That’s a formula aimed at replicating some of the at-home support children may be missing when it comes to schoolwork."
With John Taylor Gatto (NYS Teacher of the year and also schooling critic) https://www.johntaylorgatto.com/uncategorized/two-social-rev...
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
I've never heard of John Taylor Gatto before, but I just read the article you link, and it's a brutal takedown of public schools. One that I connect with.
Elizabeth Warren pointed out that the US housing crisis was partly caused by inflated house prices in good public school districts. Middle income families were paying the education of their children in high property price.
Maybe LeBron should invest into the property around the school to reap some of the benefits and use them to finance the school. Holistic property development.
Warren is academic expert bankruptcy and commercial law. She is third most cited academic in her specialty. She is pretty good at economics especially when it comes to consumer behavior and one of the best politicians overall.
"The Vanishing Middle Class" (2007) is a good book.
She is also a consummate politician, who has been known to say misleading and inflammatory things for political gain. She has also been busy steaming leftwards, a move that may endear her to young hyper-liberal voters, but does very little to help my country move past the political chasm that has opened up, and is crippling our government.
I don't think that she is a bad person, but I do believe that she is bad for American politics right now.
Not to get too off topic, but I have a hard time blaming the left for the current political divide in the United States. Saying that someone who pushes leftwards is bad for American politics because they're not closer to the "center" seems like promoting a false equivalence.
Uhh. One side saying "kids shouldn't take six figures of debt to go to the college we've collectively insisted they need to go to" and the other saying "blood and soil, Jews will not replace us" are not the same thing, yo.
The political chasm is because the democrats keep moving right to try and win over moderate republicans the republicans keep moving into crazy territory.
Moving leftwards is absolutely the best thing the democrats could possibly do. further left policies are popular. Further left policies address the massive amount of voters who don't give a shit because neither party represents anything but corporations.
America could use 50 more senators that were willing to start moving much further left.
The Right, particularly the "Freedom" Caucus goons, are specifically opposed to successfully running a country. They resent the very existence of government intervening on behalf of people at the expense of their donors. It is impossible to successfully run a country if you give those people veto power over the legislative process. They are here to engage in sabotage, not progress.
That still doesn't answer the question of why the Right isn't blamed for not reaching out to the Left. And given that they're the ones in power, it's their responsibility to do the reaching out.
The fact that she is an expert in bankruptcy and commercial law should make you extremely skeptical of her economics credentials. She spends her time in that domain, not the domain of macroeconomics.
Her academic career in that field is very impressive, but that has nothing to with an understanding of the science of Economics, which is notoriously full of counterintuitive and misunderstood truths.
This is a fallacious appeal to authority. Credentialed economists are not the only people who can make claims about economics. If you can substantively debate her assertion then please do. Otherwise you are not contributing.
Perhaps I misunderstand what you mean, but isn't this the exact opposite of an appeal to authority? The claim is that she's not qualified because she's not a credentialed economist.
(I'm not familiar enough with Ms. Warren's background to have a substantiated opinion either way, though I certainly don't doubt her intelligence.)
It’s an appeal to the authority of the economics establishment. Because Sen. Warren doesn’t teach at one of few named Economics institutions she is not allowed to speak on matters of economics.
Nokinside made an appeal to authority when he described Senator Warren's qualifications.
BurningFrog is arguing that that is not correct because Senator Warren is not an authority in the first place.
You could still argue that she is correct; but (assuming BurningFrog's judgements on her qualifications), that arguement must be on the merits of her arguements, not her qualifications.
It seems you didn't read the comment I was responding to?
In it, Nokinside claimed that Warren is an expert in Economics due to her academic career. That's what I'm arguing against.
I of course agree that people from any background, including Warren's, can make claims about Economics that should be discussed on their merits, not dismissed (or accepted...) because of the speaker's academic background.
You understand economics very narrowly if you use that as the only basis of your ad hominem. Warren worked in the field where she needed good economic knowledge.
I occasionally hear of Warren making statements, about economic matters, that are completely detached from reality. The problem isn't knowledge, it's judgement.
> anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.
This is correct only if you consider hosing availability. When the housing contains additional value (value of education) the value of housing can increase in absolute. Include the added value from education and you see the point.
Example:
(value of housing) + (value of public education in the district) = combined value of the property
Year 1997:
District A: 100 + 20 = 120
District B: 100 + 20 = 120
Year 2007:
District A: 90 + 20 = 110
District B: 110 + 40 = 150
> In other words, anyone moving to a house in a good school district leaves an empty house in a worse one.
Exactly. More demand for a fixed supply in the "good" school district, reduced demand for a fixed supply in the "bad" one. Property taxes are in some part based on the demand for houses as reflected in the assessment price. So even assuming that the market keeps those houses occupied by owners, long term the trend will be towards larger tax revenues for the good district, which drives a larger budget for education, which in turn attracts more demand for the homes.
(sorry this post got long, I mostly wanted to stress how valuable it is for a community to equalize funding per student)
In Alberta the conservative government in the 1990s controversially consolidated county school districts into much larger ones and pooled property taxes. This basically resulted in the same dollars being spent per student regardless of where they lived. I recall a lot of limousine liberals complaining about how their schools canceled their dance programs due to the mean old conservatives, but it was a profoundly liberal move, and it resulted in an influx of resources into poorer districts. At the same time it emphasized the conservative positions of local accountability and choice.
It’s worth noting that Alberta compares favorably with Finland for math and science scores[1], and has the lowest private school enrollment in Canada. There are other factors that contribute to this, but the tax reforms in the 1990s stand out as a big factor, contributing to the provincial economy and its increasing profile in academic research.
The districts had a lot of room to experiment, and Edmonton went the furthest by basically eliminating catchment areas and making schools first-come, first-served (most parent still choose schools close to them for convenience especially in elementary, high school kids could also get free city transit passes iirc). If a school’s enrollment dropped too low it could be closed and the building would be made available for a new standard or charter school to use. They also allowed for a plethora of public charter schools based on parents and principals making proposals for empty or underutilized buildings and proving they could get enrollment. This included a school that focused on hockey, one that had a focus on cadets and Canadian history, and a high school that dispensed of organized sports in favor of excellent arts facilities. None of these schools could discriminate on enrollment (except two cases I’m aware of that got an exemption, an all-girls jr high developed to test the idea that girls would do better in STEM classes without boys present, and a school for First Nations kids that focused on their culture).
I’m always puzzled that I do rarely see governors and mayors pushing through similar proposals.
Right, but if you have a county-wide increase in property value of 10%. Good school districts might see a 20% increase while bad school districts see no appreciation.
Also, there's first time homebuyers and deaths or people leaving the country/country to consider. People enter and exit the market all the time, it's not a perfect 1:1 swap all the time.
I think it's a valid point that county/state/national economic growth is rarely uniform.
You'd think that the good school districts are areas with new construction, because whoever can afford it will want to move away from the plebs. So you have big, new, expensive housing. On the other hand you'll predict unoccupied residences on the undesirable areas.
Based on the article it seems students are being drawn from around the district from the lowest performing schools, rather than from the area around the school.
So basically not the way government has done it for decades but based on market need, therefore it differs quite a bit from a 'public school' as it is being claimed to be?
Interesting! But it seems like gentrifying the area around the school is probably not in line with his vision of having at-risk children benefit from the school.
A friend of mine was ranting about how evil Bezos and Musk are. I generally don’t see those two as the worst of the worst, so I spent some time listening to her thoughts.
Her basic assertion was that the simple accumulation of that much wealth is itself evil. They could do many things like build schools and since they choose not to they are evil.
I mentioned to her that they can’t sell their stock without ceding control, so it might make sense to wait to spend the money. But mostly I was just interested in absorbing her point.
There was also a secondary claim about an imperative to use one’s social media platform to correct abuses. But I believe that was a secondary point.
Anyway, I’ve just been tossing that over in my head. Does it say something about someone’s heart if they aren’t building schools and hospitals the moment they obtain enough wealth to do so comfortably?
The profit comes from the labour of people who work for you. Any profit you make is the difference between what their true labour is worth and what you pay them. So unless the owners are adding billions in value by themselves they are paying people less than the true value of their work.
The extent at which this happens is where some ethical issues lie. If you keep wages low while making large profit there is a point of view that you are ripping off your workers and this can be seen as unethical.
There is also the argument that large corporations that legally avoid paying tax and lobby to keep the loopholes open are making money by utilising public resources and not paying for them. These public resources support their workers and help the company to succeed. Bezos for example is particularly successful at avoiding tax and lobbying to keep it that way. Despite it being legal it could be considered ethically dubious as he is not contributing back to a system that helped him succeed.
Value creation is not a zero-sum game. A cooperative selling the same products and services as, say, Amazon might not make the same profit. Coherent vision and leadership can contribute a lot to the value creation process.
> A cooperative selling the same products and services as, say, Amazon might not make the same profit.
It might make more. It might make less because it's paying it's workers more fairly.
> Coherent vision and leadership can contribute a lot to the value creation process.
Yes, this is also labour and should receive a fair value. Everyone in the company is a worker but "unless the owners are adding billions in value by themselves they are paying people less than the true value of their work".
Bezos in particular chooses to actively avoid making profit and hide profits to deliberately avoid paying tax. When Amazon makes a profit they still don't pay tax:
He's not doing it innocently, it's tactical. They lobby to keep the loopholes open. Although its not illegal, it could be considered unethical which I believe is the context of the original discussion.
>Her basic assertion was that the simple accumulation of that much wealth is itself evil. They could do many things like build schools and since they choose not to they are evil.
This is, essentially, a debased version of the standard leftist argument that economic systems that permit this sort of concentration of resources are fundamentally broken.
Since people have to personalize everything into morality plays, the idea that the existence of such people is symptomatic of something broken in society turns into these people are why society is broken.
Granted, since they DO have the resources to fix a lot of issues and choose not to still doesn't say anything good about them. There is something to the adage that if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem. And if you're directly profiting off the problems, potentially spending money on lobbyists and political donations that prolong the problems, and bidding for contracts with groups that are directly responsible for the problems. . . it starts to get a bit dicey.
The way the economy is, it is extremely doubtful that anyone can accrue that kind of wealth without having their fingers in at least a few morally questionable pies. Like, if you were a steel magnate in Nazi Germany, you were definitely involved in making the holocaust happen regardless of your personal feelings on the matter. If you didn't, someone else would have though, so how much are you really obligated to address?
Andrew Carnegie, the 20th century industrialist, is perhaps the poster child for wealth accumulation and subsequent philanthropy. I remember reading somewhere that he once said something to the effect of, "A man should spend the first third of his life learning as much as he can; the second third amassing as much money as he can using his acquired knowledge; and the last third giving away both the knowledge and the money."
There aren't that many billionaires. So are you saying they aren't the worst of the billionaire class? That's really the only way I can see the phrase working.
> I mentioned to her that they can’t sell their stock without ceding control
What about changing voting schemes?
> Does it say something about someone’s heart if they aren’t building schools and hospitals the moment they obtain enough wealth to do so comfortably?
I think it says something about their heart if they are able to get that wealthy, with rare exceptions.
Neither are going to happen. He might toss around a bit of money to try and buy a better reputation, but he's still the worlds richest man by standing on the backs of the very people who's kids need better education.
The most interesting thing to me is that it is eschewing being a charter or private school and apparently expects to be able to work within the confines of the local school district and teachers' union.
I've never really understood why this is usually considered difficult or impossible for such a project.
Also, with 25-30 kids per class, $10k works to $250k-300k per year which seems sufficient for a teacher, aide, facilities and support.
I too was thinking along these lines but I think these are inflated numbers.
Average class room size is 21.6 for elementary schools that are self-contained (26 for departmentalized). https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s... I think the desire is for 20 or less. When you're dealing with children, a lot of teachers are required.
So let's say LeBron is going for 20:1. Then it's now $200k per class. Let's say half of that goes to the teacher due to competitive pay and payroll tax + healthcare + benefits. You're looking at $5k/student for 3 healthy meals a day, facilities, and everything else.
Doesn't seem like very much anymore. You could dock teacher pay more but it won't probably be enough to outweigh the cons.
One could also try to up the ratio of students:teachers but then you're just going to give the kids a worse education and the teachers a much worse teaching environment. I think having a small classroom size is pretty important for kids who are struggling as they need more attention. And this school is literally for struggling kids - so there's gonna be a lot of competition for attention.
Just yesterday I was doing some research on the state of education in my home state of California, starting with a transcript of a 2003 Morrow Report TV program titled "From first to worst." The rough gist is that California for many years was mandated to allocate approximately equal (and generally inadequate!) funding between districts to correct inequalities of opportunity between school districts. Originally, this was done by adjusting how much the state kicked in above the local district funding; after Prop 13 it became mostly a question of state allocation, since districts could no longer effectively raise their own funds.
Foundations arose as a way for parents to ensure proper funding in districts that were lucky enough to have the donors. So, thank goodness that some districts haven't fallen through the floor, but we're back in the unequal situation we were in before.
Since that 2003 report, charter schools and an update to the funding policy called the "Local Control Funding Formula" have tried to address some of the shortcomings of the equal-across-the-board policy (namely, woefully inadequate funding for districts with greater low-income and english-learning challenges), but our state still funds in the low middle of the pack or at the dirt bottom of state spending per pupil, depending on whether you take cost of living into account.
LBJ's foundation would seem to have arisen along similar lines: like CA, the state is not doing nearly enough to support its public schools, so private citizens have to try to fill the gap through philanthropy. This is great for the children of Akron, but the limitations are clear: it's one school in one corner of the state! I hope this is a shot across the bow that convinces people that raising taxes to fund education properly is not the end-all boondoggle that so many people seem to think it is. A superstar per school doesn't sound scalable to me.
[[ In the British system the thing that makes a Public School different isn't whether it's run by the state (those are State Schools) but the fact that it's open _to_ the public. Historically some schools were exclusively for (children of) members of an organisation, for example a school might be for Roman Catholics, or members of the livery company of goldsmiths, or businessmen of a certain city. The Public Schools didn't care who you were, or where you came from, only that your money was good. ]]
No, it's opposite of Britain, most countries are in line with the USA in this regard, including former British Colonies like Australia. Britians history is the only reason their version sense, it's very unintuitive.
Yup. Lots of things are weird in Britain because it's old, this doesn't make those things a good idea to be copied. Though it also isn't a reason to dismiss them. Old isn't necessarily bad.
Britain's railway signalling is crazy because Britain's railways pre-date railway signalling. If you build a brand new railway you definitely shouldn't repeat mistakes from the 19th century.
Britain drives on the Left. Should you drive on the left too? Only if your neighbors do.
But on the other hand Britain decided to buy up all the doctors and hospitals and stuff to give everybody healthcare and that's worked out pretty well.
> American public schools are run by local government only for people the local government wants to admit
Eh? Everyone is admitted to public schools in America. You often don't get the choose the specific school, but everyone has the right to a place in a school.
The public school movement in the UK was all about letting members of the public choose a specific school without being constrained by things that they cannot control like the area they lived in (or what organisation their parents worked for).
Many states, and even local municipalities, have "school of choice" program that, while somewhat restricted, allow children to attend a school they would prefer between districts and many times between different geographical regions. (I presently live in one such state that offers this). There are a lot of factors at play there, but being able to choose the school you want to attend is available in the states.
Not being able to choose the specific school is a huge deal though.
In the same school system, some of the schools are out-of-this-world, while others are zoos.
If I had the choice between sending my kids to some of the schools I went to growing up, or letting them stay home and watch cartoons all day, I'd choose the latter. At least they're not going to get shivved watching Adventure Time.
Yes, one is public with lots of caveats. The other is public with one or no caveats, ie. where do you live? I'm homeless. Doesn't matter, you're enrolled.
I'm wondering if this school will be sustainable in the long term. Given the correlation between low-income neighborhoods and poor school performance, how is I Promise going to be supported by taxpayers? Many school districts scrounge for basic supplies; how long will they be able to keep this free bike program going?
They could make it self-sustaining by adding some business model to support it. As others have said, maybe buy up and renovate/rent out homes near by driving up property costs (and taxes), or 'encouraging' college alums down the road to give back from their success.
Maybe the model itself proves something on a national level, and the government decides this is the 'future' and earmarks more money for schools like this...
Or maybe they just get more donations from wealthy people who want to help. Either way, I'm sure there are ways to offset the costs and keep it going long-term.
> As others have said, maybe buy up and renovate/rent out homes near by driving up property costs (and taxes), or 'encouraging' college alums down the road to give back from their success.
Thus defeating the entire purpose of this school. Gentrifying will result in the school being surrounded by housing that the students parents can't afford.
If the property value goes up the rent will go up, because nobody will be willing to invest in capital construction or home management unless they can make their money back.
Why not create community 'owned' housing, similar to a worker co-op, where poorer communities collectively 'own' the location. Everyone pays area-rental fees, but each month rented = 1 share ownership. Once the mortgage is paid off, the rent goes towards buying more rental properties and rinsing/repeating. A % of all rents is divided out by shares to each renter or ex-renter. A % could also go to LeBron's public school as a donation.
Obviously the longer you stay at a place and the smaller the place the more shares you'd have in the place. Shares could also = voting rights on properties/etc... More votes = louder voice.
Think of it as privatized (not government-ran) socialism in the real estate market.
If the property values go up, other people will buy the houses surrounding the collective, forcing the collective to pay more for housing and thereby raising the rents.
The cynic in me was thinking the same thing. There's going to have to be a change of thinking with a lot of folks as well - that bike may represent $20 worth of scrap metal, $20 in a pocket now that might pay for food, necessities, habits. And that program could quickly turn dark. Anecdotally, a close friend of mine operated a pawn shop in a downtrodden area of Detroit and would frequently comment on how many brand new bikes were walked through the door, for which they paid very little.
Getting some folks to realize that it's providing freedom rather than fast cash is going to be an accomplishment. Perhaps this will even produce a positive cultural shift.
That is were it is useful to have LeBron as the face of the program. To the kids, and families these aren't nebulously owned government bikes, these are LeBron's bikes.
Yeah, I was very surprised to see this is a normal public school. I'm not sure how that works with this school having a different schedule and teachers having different hours and perks (interesting from the union point of view). But I'm all for trying out different approaches and see what can be applied district wide. Cudos to Lebron and his team for doing this.
It is SOOOO nice to see people with money actually putting good ideas into practice rather than using their money as a platform to spread opinions that mean nothing or to criticise people who try things instead of doing it themselves.
Second: Even if this school has good results, it seems unlikely that it will scale well, because it's relying on more money (from outside donors, etc.). You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
From Larry Summers talking with Tyler Cowen:
COWEN: And this is K–12.
SUMMERS: Yeah. That’s likely to be the most effective thing that you can do, but that you need to be very careful not to succeed by cannibalization. Many, too many, philanthropists interested in education decide they’re going to set up a charter school. Only their charter school is only going to admit highly motivated kids with highly motivated parents.
Their charter school’s going to pay 20 percent more than the regular schools and cherry-pick the best teachers out of the regular schools. Then they’re going to be really thrilled about how they have better achievement than the regular public schools when it’s clear from the nature of their model, selecting the kids and cherry-picking the teachers, that it is supremely nonreplicable.
I would say impose a replicability constraint on yourself and innovate in the area of education. My general view has been that a lot of the way successful innovation happens is alongside big systems.
>>You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
You can if "not enough money" was the problem in the first place. And for public schools in low income areas of America, that might end up being a big part of the problem.
This feeds into the 'if everybody can't succeed, then put up roadblocks to anybody succeeding'.
Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school. Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken. To defy this impulse because it isn't replicable, is to deny the part the govt plays in creating the broken public schools.
> Sometimes charter schools are there to do exactly what's been described there: create at least one good school.
Mostly, charter schools select for the best students by, even if no other filters apply, selecting the students whose parents are engaged enough to select a non-default school.
There are mounds of evidence that “good schools” in the US—whether traditional private, traditional public, public-subsidized private charter, or public charter—are a product of getting the right student population rather than substantive differences between schools.
> Because the public system is largely underfunded/broken.
That's really not the problem.
The problem is that American society is largely broken, and we expect the public schools to perform as if it weren't (or to magically make up for it.)
OTOH, the schools are an easy scapegoat and distraction, and because the problem isn't fundamentally there, there is no risk that changes there will ever relieve the outcome problems enough for it to stop being a useful distraction.
> There are mounds of evidence that “good schools” in the US—whether traditional private, traditional public, public-subsidized private charter, or public charter—are a product of getting the right student population rather than substantive differences between schools.
I think a lot of this comes down to the metrics used for gauging good schools. Which are usually test scores, graduation rates, and discipline rates.
Assuming that the test scores measure something worthwile, test scores is always reported as a point in time measurement -- but really a progression would be more informative. What I really want to know is will my kid go up or down or stay the same in test scores if they attend school X, it's not super important what the average score is ; especially since the progression may vary significantly based on the input score.
Graduation rates could be low because of many factors outside of school, or could be high because the standards are low, and are often reported only at the high school level but kids who don't graduate high school were often not well prepared at other levels, etc.
Discipline rates can be meaningful, but if one school doesn't expel anybody because all the children are angels, and one school doesn't expel anybody because they haven't noticed the large numbers of murders during recess, the numbers look the same.
> Discipline rates can be meaningful, but if one school doesn't expel anybody because all the children are angels, and one school doesn't expel anybody because they haven't noticed the large numbers of murders during recess, the numbers look the same.
I think any town not named Sunnydale would notice the dwindling class sizes in the latter case.
Well, they noticed dwindling class sizes. If their discipline problems included murders during recess, that would likely be lost in the noise from vampires and other supernatural hazards.
On the other hand, it's clear that sucking good teachers, good students, and good parents from public schools into selective charters is a form of "brain drain" that negatively impacts the performance of students at public schools.
Ontario has this effect as well with the separate Catholic school board, which is a long-standing bit of political football. Publicly funded, but pays better and has no mandate as far as providing special education, remedial programs, etc. So yeah, no surprise that the Catholic schools perform better than the public ones, which leads to a narrative that they're "doing something right" and makes a discussion about merging the two systems that much harder to engage in.
Public schools have been doing this for decades. Creating at least one good school for high intellect students. They are called magnet, governor's school, or experimental school. Where it is hoped the teaching methods tried there can be passed into the broader public school system.
Charter schools do not share that motivation. If they find a teaching method that works better their objective is not to share to but instead use it to capitalize and enrich themselves.
Finally, charter schools are publicly funded. If they are taking tax-payer money the results should absolutely be replicable.
Same source also has as-percentage of GDP figures, and while it does move the US more towards the middle, it doesn’t refute GPs point that the US spends a lot on schools. Perhaps it is distributed inefficiently or inequitably, but that wasn’t a point GP raised.
Is it? For me that sound more like 'if everybody can't succeed, then make sure you succeed at the cost of decreasing the level for everybody else'.
If I am taking the good teachers from the other schools, I am not fixing anything, I am just transferring social capital from someone else kids to mine.
The reason the school days are long is because the kids generally have nowhere to go and are susceptible to gang violence or other trouble since there are rarely adults who can pick them up at 3. It is trying to give them shelter and a place to stay out of trouble.
That's all good, but you can do such things without longer structured school days. The school does have some of this, happily.
I'd much prefer the school to have fun morning activities before class (games in the computer lab, for example, bonus points if you can tie that into learning without the kids realising it) while having an official starting time that is late in the day. This covers kids that have to wake up early due to their parents schedule, but lets kids that can sleep, well, sleep. If the days are going to be longer, is there more recess? More downtime? More art and music and otherwise "fun" stuff? These things help with learning. Same for after school, honestly.
A great bonus that is included is support for schoolwork that is missing at home. I'd rather have a no-homework school in lower grades as it makes more sense, but this is the next best thing.
I might also mention that these are 2nd and 3rd graders. I don't know if they are the sorts that are actually susceptible to gang violence outside of what happens around them. They do, however, have the issues poverty brings up, which is what the school seems more geared towards. Food banks, job help, GED help, and free counselors for those that have endured trauma, which comes in many different forms outside of gang violence - poverty is one predictor of having it.
Trying to replicate may be the biggest problem with education.
LeBron grew up in Akron. He knows the problems these kids are facing, and he's going out of his way to solve it specifically for them.
That kind of local leadership combined with updating the school day and curriculum for kids with specific problems that are best understood at the local level can't be replicable.
How that is applied to apportionment is an open question. Vouchers always seemed like the best solution to me, but I'm not expert on this subject.
> You can't throw more money at a problem, then declare you've come up with a general solution.
I agree in general that throwing money at a problem by itself is rarely useful. However, I think your statement sets up a false dichotomy. Is the answer to give every school 10 billion dollars? No. Is the answer to fund schools enough that they can give free meals to students and pay teachers enough to stay? Maybe.
It’s so weird to come on HN and read how money isn’t the solution and we’re just throwing money after problems, then go onto my Facebook and see gofundme campaigns from my teacher friends trying to afford supplies for their students.
It really enforces to me that most people don’t let their lack of knowledge or interest in an area stop them from passing judgements.
The general solution is adults doing what they can for children...and not just their own. James is in a position to do something for a significant number of other people's children and he is. Sure, goodwill for poor children doesn't scale to everyone, and James is just helping a drop in the ocean. But even Summers has shown goodwill for the children of the rich and powerful with his acceptance of the Harvard presidency. All that's left is consistency on that cherry picking thing.
I worked for 2 years as an AmeriCorps volunteer in Atlanta Public Schools. I'll preface this by saying I don't know if I believe charter schools are bad or good, but here are some arguments against them:
- Charter schools take money away from neighborhood public schools. Most schools are funded per-capita, so fewer students means less money. But many costs are fixed/discrete (e.g. school nurse costs N thousand dollars).
- Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
- Corporatization is evil. Charter schools often run more like a business than a socialized institution. Some even pay kids for good grades. Often, the success of a charter school depends on marketing, and successful marketing depends on performing well on metrics. Charter schools are then incentivized to "teach to the test" and potentially force out students who don't perform well. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
That's a pretty good summary of the common anti-charter arguments. A few counter-arguments to the above:
- Charter schools expand choice for low-income families. If your public school sucks and your family is doing well, you can always move elsewhere or go to private school. If you're from a poor family, charter schools are your only escape valve
- Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates.
- The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit. The people running and funding a charter school are just as motivated by good intentions, as those in public schools. They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go.
- Metrics can be gamed, but a complete lack of metrics can also be exploited by underperforming/incompetent/disengaged organizations. Tracking a reasonably good metric is better than tracking no metric at all - something seen in how most successful organizations operate.
>The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit.
According to this article [1], schools can technically be registered as a non-profit, but contract out day to day operations to a for-profit management company owned by the same people who run the non-profit.
This setup allows the school to take in tax free donations, but it means that from a profit motive standpoint it's identical to a for-profit school.
I have no idea how common this is, but it does mean that it's not quite as simple as saying that the vast majority are non-profit.
"Charter schools expand choice for low-income families."
Only if charter schools are not permitted to pick and choose who attends.
"Maybe it's bad for the public school, but it's good for the high performing students themselves, who are no longer dragged down by disruptive/disengaged classmates."
This kinda boils down to "fuck you, I've got mine." It's why no one likes libertarians.
"The vast majority of charter schools are non-profit."
Citation needed. And a citation that they're actually non-profit, and not a non-profit in the same way the NFL is a non-profit.
"They just happen to experiment with different approaches and methods, while giving students/parents the final say on where they want to go."
Yeah, but many times those "experiments" have to do with just breaking unions.
In the area where I live, there is a lot of anticipation for a Charter school to open because the county school board is so terrible. There are 6 regional seats for a single county wide school district and 3 of the seats vote against ANY improvements or expense increases. In a tie vote, nothing happens. It's been an issue for years at this point.
There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
>There is a charter coming to the highest population area of the county and people are excited simply because it's managed by a state level school board instead of the county.
What's the impediment to voting out those people? Do they represent areas that are mostly retirement communities or something?
> Charter schools have inflated performance metrics. Often charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
Thats an interesting way of saying that charter schools get better results.
Given the set of high-ability students, it does seem that charter schools have better results.
There's an attitude that everybody should do poorly together, and that's better than anybody succeeding. Like a bucket of crabs, each clawing at the others trying to get out and pulling them back in that keeps the poor, doing poorly. And well-meaning ivory-tower types fuel the culture with idealistic 'fairness' arguments.
Charter schools like elite colleges gain 90% of their reputation from rejecting average or below students. There is variation among school quality adjusting for incoming students, however that exists for both normal and charter schools with many charter schools preforming worse than expected and many public schools preforming far above expectations.
However, if you want to support the value of some institution or approach it's really easy to ignore this fact and create biased research.
Citation? Its not about reputation (irrelevant) but accomplishment. And in the OP case, we're talking about one school helping one demographic. I wish this new school all the best luck in helping these kids.
Recent research on statewide voucher programs in Louisiana and Indiana has found that public school students that received vouchers to attend private schools subsequently scored lower on reading and math tests compared to similar students that remained in public schools.https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vo...
And are charter schools about reading and math? Cherry picking results is easy to show whatever you like.
Charter schools are about - whatever each is constituted to be about. Like you can't go to a hardware store and grab a random tool and rate it on how well it drills holes. You shouldn't rate charter schools on your favorite metric. Some are about upper-class folk raising their kids with better music and art appreciation. Others are about escaping backward school boards. Sometimes they are in areas so backward, that the charter school still underperforms the national average. But if its an improvement for that area, its an improvement.
The "sacrifices" involved in any decision here are actual children too.
For example for me specialization couldn't come too early. Specializing even at age 12 would have been fine. Everything else could have fallen by the wayside, I only was interested in and good at exactly one thing and only at University did I finally meet anybody who actually challenged me, only there did I find specialisations within the specialisation that were all attractive. In some ways the last 3-4 years of school were just waiting.
For plenty of other kids they got all the way to an undergraduate degree in some general subject area they didn't care about, still with no clear idea what they were about, no real direction, forcing them to specialize earlier would have hurt them severely by cutting off options.
Without fairly intensive Chemistry (and preferably some Biology) by age sixteen, you are not going to become a good medical doctor. Without putting many hours a week into mathematics (not just enough to grasp a vaguely analytical subject like engineering, serious fundamental mathematics) by age eighteen you are never going to become a serious mathematician. And sucks to be you if, aged twenty-five, you at last find out you are a natural with a basketball, or at soccer, or dozens of other sports which require peak physical performance that's unattainable in middle age.
All our options here suck, somewhere a kid will be betrayed by whatever happens, if they're able to specialise, some of them will pick wrong and regret it. No fault to them, just bad luck. If they can't specialise the mandatory general achievement will prevent some of the most talented in specific fields from ever achieving what was possible.
I have no recommendation here, just commiserations.
There are plenty of short term advantages to specialization. But, diminishing returns generally apply and the standard public school curriculum is a relatively low bar. So, IMO we should generally stick with them, but after that the sky's the limit.
That said, you have a good point that some fields really do require a lot of early work. I just think they should be added as supplement not simply replacing the foundations of a good education.
Yes, due to an unfair advantage. As per the text you quoted:
> charter schools don't serve special needs students. More than that, charter schools bias towards engaged and interested parents. Because of policies like No Child Left Behind, it is really bad for local neighborhood schools to have all of their high performing students leave for charter schools.
so if I'm an engaged and interested parent, and I want my child to succeed, looks like charter schools are the correct answer about where to send my kids.
But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."
You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.
Not necessarily. Charter schools do much better if you measure just output, but are frequently quite average once you control for their advantageous population.
It depends how much you weigh “Does the charter school actually teach my child better than a public school”(statistically, no, and they might even teach worse!) and also “do I care about exposing my child to people they’re different from”(ie. Avoiding them being stuck in a bubble) and also “am I unable to find another environment for intellectual pursuits”(clubs, extracurriculars, etc. when I was young there were definitely after-school schooling available for smart kids, and at school you can stay late for science teachers to teach you more science).
An individual parent’s incentives do tend to point in this direction, if their metric for success as a parent doesn’t include being exposed to children whose family’s aren’t as successful.
But when taken to an extreme, this leads to exclusive areas and excluded people.
The real question is whether they get results that are as much better as they should be, since they are selecting students up front. I suspect that picking your inputs at a very young age is more about marketing and capturing money than it is about true ability to perform.
Either that, or it is simply a follow on of the fact that parents with money, free time, and high levels of education tend to have students that do well in school. The school may make no difference at all if the kids learn a lot at home.
Kids going to School A from School B means that School A doesn't need to pay anything for that student. Plus public charter schools typically run less overhead and are more efficient per student.[0]
Lol, school nurse. Those disappeared in the 80s. Now it is normal for a single first aid attendant to cover multiple schools. Nurses cost way too much.
The core issue is that they figure out how to deliver schooling at a minimal operating cost while maximizing returns to the investors who hold the bonds on the building. The investors are often charter school advocates or in the know. Frankly, it's a corrupt and disgusting system.
Once they start operating, they are intensely focused on minimizing cost. That translates into alot of student displacement as children who are disruptive or have various disabilities get tossed back, and increases the costs and operational challenges.
They are also disruptive to orderly and efficient operations of school districts. Kids and bureaucracies don't accept change well -- bouncing these kids creates problems.
In the small city I live in, charters appeared like locusts, and led the city district to close and sell a couple of schools. As the charters attrit troublesome students and get shut down for poor performance, hundreds of kids get "dumped". That results in overcrowded and high churn schools. My local elementary school lost it's music room, half of the library and has two outdoor classrooms as additional space that had to be cleared out to accomodate disabled students and handle growing class sizes.
They're stuck in a catch-22 -- their budgets are out of wack because they need proportionally more special ed teachers, and it's hard to know true capacity and more charters open and close.
A few years ago we put my daughter into a new charter school. We were really excited because on the surface it seemed like she would get a much more tailored and personalized education with better facilities and staff. The only problem is that my daughter has ADHD.
As soon as there were social issues between my daughter and her teachers or her and other students (bullying by other students), the staff quickly turned against us. We met with the principal several times about specific students bullying her but all they wanted to talk about was how she wasn't showing up often enough to school (she often faked being sick to avoid her bullies).
We quickly realized that the school was only concerned about losing funding because of attendance metrics and we pulled her out. It was a horrible experience for us.
That's why I was careful to say these are the conditions only in my immediate region. In my opinion grouping this by State is too macro. There are charter schools in my area predominantly attended by black students but they are central and easily accessible. There are charter schools further away from the city center that require additional travel that is simply not as affordable to lower income students. The numbers at a state level would show a more distributed attendance by race that the reality does not reflect.
Kids with special needs are statistically less served by charter schools - significantly.
This means a greater burden on the non charter schools with the same budget (charter school students don't pay more) - and special needs kids aren't paid by federal funds (where I live it's mostly local tax).
Also they statistically perform equally or more poorly compared to public schools.
I guess one solution is that we then get charter schools that cater to special needs students.. we sort of have these programs already with center based autism "schools". However, going down this path will eventually run into Brown vs board of education.
How do charter schools not do that already? No skin in the game here, but isn't getting rid of special schooling the whole point of eliminating separate yet equal?
Charter schools typically don't offer special education programs and have selective admissions. They are looking for kids who get high test scores on standardized testing. With special education you want the least restrictive environment and that involves special education support in as normal a school environment as possible (aka regular classes).
I'm going to try hard to keep this in "Why are charter schools demonized?" territory and out of "Should charter be schools demonized?" territory
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short answer, is that a lot of them tend to be run by scammers trying to turn a buck
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Long answer, is that education is actually a weird product, with a lot of information asymmetries baked in, and where a lot of time the quality people are actually hoping to buy is the signal around the product, instead of the product itself
And the signal is often elusive if that's what you're actually hoping to buy
Charter schools are a great option when your school district has poor management and private school is not an option for some reason. Teacher unions hate them for a various number of reasons, in my view the main reason is that they are threatened by them. There are great charter schools and great public schools as well as horrible public schools and charter schools.
I happened across a free play in the park by Lake Merritt (Bay Area). It was well produced, singing, acting, sets, the whole nine yards.
At first I just thought it was a schoolroom drama, but then I realized it was a full on anti-charter school propaganda piece. Like, mustache twisting, “if I can only get rid of this pesky teaching thing, I can get rich!” villains.
It struck me as bizzarre. Not because I disagree with their position... maybe that’s in fact happening in the Bay. I just didn’t understand who is enjoying such an overt propaganda piece. Where’s the joy in being beaten over the head with a political message?
And what are the producers thinking? People are too dumb to be informed or to form their own conclusions so we need to trick them into hating charter schools?
That's a tough question to answer because "charter school" doesn't have a very specific definition. It's just a publicly-funded school whose charter opts it out of some number of the regulations that apply to typical public schools in the same jurisdictions.
In some states/districts, they're basically public schools that have an external partner. I taught at such a school in Baltimore. In other places, they're more or less completely independent of the district that funds them. Anywhere on that spectrum, you can cherry-pick successes and disasters.
But certainly, they have introduced a great deal more complexity and ambiguity in the discourse of education. Much of the negativity towards charters comes from a skepticism that is difficult to fully inform. So people are forced to take the shortcut of deciding whether they are for or against "charter schools", broadly speaking. Fact is, not everyone has time to become an expert, in order to hold more nuanced opinions.
I prefer to frame the debate around the "school choice" movement, which is broader idea that districts should work more like marketplaces or laboratories for education. I'm very skeptical. For one thing, the "choice" that results isn't free and isn't equally distributed. For another, it tends to centralize the blame for poor outcomes on poor performers in the district, rather than systemic issues. Yet, most of the poor performers are the very schools that have the highest risk students, because these are the same students unlikely to have the agency and social capital to effectively exercise their choice.
Because it's not in the interests of the teacher's union to fracture the public school system. The larger, more faceless and immeasurable it gets, the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them.
Charter schools (usually) do not have unionized teachers that are part of the larger teacher's unions. That means they have their own standards for hiring and firing teachers that they can do in response to poor performing teachers.
The counter argument is that charter schools take money away from public school systems, further leading to their collapse as it's a vicious cycle. Parent pulls child from crappy school, school loses funding, school gets worse, more parents pull their kids, etc.
> the harder it is to isolate individual teachers as the cause of children not learning on pace and then fire them
The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes.
Maybe there's more to improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause.
> 5. None of this means that teacher evaluation "doesn’t work." Rather, the point is that it’s much more complicated and much harder to do well than advocates, the Gates Foundation, or these districts initially anticipated.
There is clearly more to 'improving student education than isolating individual teachers as a cause', but average effectiveness of the faculty of a program is going to be a fairly defining metric.
What if we focus on evaluating the technique rather than the teacher to take a little bit of the vindictiveness out of the discussion and more properly equip those that are entering the field? Today new K12 teachers in the US are given basic skills around classroom management, building student relationships and the technical substrate required to teach the material. From there, young teachers learn on the fly from the staff they work with (usually the first problem), their own intuition and whatever resources and experiences are available to them.
Clearly there is some kind of spectrum, Richard Feynman vs Ben Stein in Ferris Beuller's Day Off, how do you decompose those differences in a way that you can measure their component contribution to overall effectiveness and build the most important ones up in those that are just entering the field. Maybe there are different 'roles' in teaching that could be aligned to personality types...the 'inspirers' and the 'questioners' and the 'fortifiers' and the 'ass kickers'.
I don't know the answer. I do know there are good teachers and great teachers and ones that are ten years overdue for a different career and I feel that it's worth continued time and energy sorting out what makes it that way.
> The Gates Foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the 'Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative' [0], only to find that teacher evaluation isn't an effective way to improve student outcomes.
Did you actually read the article to which you linked? Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):
> The reforms demanded too much time. The evaluations required an enormous amount of time and paperwork, and were frequently seen as a burden and distraction by teachers and school leaders alike.
> Principals tended to rate teachers highly, and scores inflated over time. It turns out that principals generally don’t like to give negative evaluations to their teachers, especially when they don’t really trust that poor performers will be removed. If principals expect that teachers will stick around regardless, they’d rather be on good terms and avoid alienating their staff.
> None of this means that teacher evaluation “doesn’t work.”
The problem isn't that rating and firing teachers doesn't work. It's that rating without the ability to fire is pointless and whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous. I blame both of those on teacher's unions which are, IMHO, one of the worst forms of public sector unions.
I did overstate my case. I think you are also overstating yours.
> rating without the ability to fire is pointless
A fair point.
> whatever rating system they came up with was too onerous.
All measurement systems come at a cost. Picking the unions to blame without looking at what the researchers or the funders required seems premature.
You don't like unions. Finland, where education reform has worked, has teachers unions. It might serve you well to investigate further if you want to achieve education reform here.
One more thing: It's worth a pass over the next-level article [0] summarizing the findings of the RAND corporation study, notably this cherry-pick of my own:
> A near-exclusive focus on TE might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes. Many other factors might need to be addressed, ranging from early childhood education, to students' social and emotional competencies, to the school learning environment, to family support. Dramatic improvement in outcomes, particularly for LIM students, will likely require attention to many of these factors as well.
It vastly oversimplifies things to focus on teacher evaluation (and consequences) as a solution, and further oversimplifies things to blame unions.
"Per the state of Ohio, Akron’s schools were given just $10,028 in state and local funds per student in 2016 — more than the statewide average, but still a relatively low figure for a city of a little under 200,000."
Relative to what? You've already told us it was higher than the state average. To call it relatively lower means that there are some who receive more, but we're in the dark as to who they are.
The #1 factor for improving schools would be public school choice. Competition makes the participants in any system better. The schools need to use a lottery for acceptance of students.
We can drop all the regulation around testing results and simply let people choose which public school they go to. Some schools will be great and have a lot of demand. Some schools will be crap and will have little demand and they should get a reset.
The big challenge will be getting kids to the schools, but this can be done in conjunction with public transit using rideshare type shuttles to create custom routes
The next biggest factor is demand from students themselves. Making education exciting like sports could work. Create academic contests that can be televised, have small prizes at the school level (thousands of dollars), tens of thousands at the regional level, and millions at the state or national level.
Televise the competitions and have a variety like debates, math, science, etc.
If the following are true:
1) children in different areas have similar poverty levels and home lives
2) schools in different areas are funded adequately
3) the quality of teachers and administrators are independent of funding
then, improving competition would help parents pick the right schools for their kids, improving educational outcomes.
However, 1 and 2 are definitely not true, and I think 3 is not true as well (higher salaries attract good teachers.)
If you want to improve education outcomes in the US, you must improve funding for schools in poor areas, increase incomes for parents (possibly with a child allowance), reduce discriminatory law enforcement that disproportionately targets poor and minority parents, and much more.
"Competition makes the participants in any system better."
That's not universally true. There are places where the neighborhood public school is in "competition" with charter schools, however, the charter schools aren't required to play by the same rules (get to select which students attend, don't have to cater to special needs students, etc). The public school receives less funding, and thus is stretched much thinner due to what it has to provide.
In High School, I went to a magnet school where you had to be in the top 5% of your middle school class to be accepted. We took in students from something like 10 school districts. Freshman year was insane because the quality of student was all over the place. There were segments of students who couldn't read.
There are absolutely socioeconomic factors that played into this, and "letting bad schools fail" is only going to hurt the students that are already hurting.
I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?
Test culture promotes lack of growth mindset as students tend to associate their capabilities with their scores from an early age. The earlier we start stratifying students by test scores the more we are likely to develop adults who believe in fixed ability and who don't want to challenge themselves. This is exacerbated when you start separating students into physically different schools based on test scores.
>I struggle a lot when it comes to education because "teaching to a test" is the bane of teachers everywhere, but if we don't set a standard, how will we measure success?
Part of the question is who sets the standard and what do they optimize for?
My experience with most of these NCLB tests is that they're optimized for ease of grading more than actually measuring anything worthwhile about comprehension of development.
- This school is a true public school and not a charter school. In Ohio a lot of charter schools can have some degree of selection in their students and kick out families which don't meet the requirements which leads to more at-risk students left to the public schools. This school is making a point of taking at-risk students.
- Longer school days, 3 meals, and a longer school year helps students stay focused. Unfortunately the home environment for a lot of kids makes it so hard for these kids to be able to focus at school. In my wife's elementary school classes some kids show up with just a hamburger bun for breakfast. Others fall asleep immediately at school since they live with 5+ siblings and there are literally no available beds at home. I am not trying to blame the parents in all the cases either, a lot of the time there are single parents just trying to get by and make ends meet and don't know what more they can do.
- Focussing on the teachers will also help. Teachers and unions have been vilified by Governor Kasich but they are not the main problem at all (it is the tragic home environments) with ridiculous review systems and standards, but then there is little support in challenging districts like in Akron/Cleveland. It is a lot easier to work in the suburbs where the kids would progress and learn even without teachers, so that is where everyone wants to go since a good rating is automatic. I think this problem occurs in just about every field where metrics dominate the review system (medicine, call centers, QA, etc). The turnover for teachers at local charter schools is terrible and only seems to attract early-career teachers who couldn't get a job at a public school.
- This doesn't seem to be a short term flashy project but has been years in the making. None of the features here are gimmicky, but just like many things in life it takes a lot of hard work!
- Adding the goal of college education shows a path forward which a lot of students don't think is possible.
I am super excited to be from Akron and I hope this model proves successful!