PS 411

[Jennifer]

And of course, such chairs are hardly the only problem. There's also the slew of dilapidated-textbook photos, too.

[Number 6]

And of course, such chairs are hardly the only problem. There's also the slew of dilapidated-textbook photos, too.

Are we expected to believe that books in Oklahoma are being read?

[Kolohe]

Is anyone here that surprised that socialism in poorer places misallocates resources more visibly than socialism in better off places?

[Warren]

All the home-schooler's I've known (both of them) have done it because public schools suck. My old roomate's brother home-schooled his kids, one of them got into one of the ivy's (Princeton I think) at 16. He wasn't a conspiracy nut, but he had his quirks. He was very concerned about climate change. He bought 'organic' food when he could afford it. That sort of thing. The thing that got me though, was how he instilled in his daughters the belief that all men were dangerous and not to be trusted. I wonder what effect that had on his eldest as she set off for college just a few years into puberty.

[Number 6]

All the home-schooler's I've known (both of them) have done it because public schools suck. My old roomate's brother home-schooled his kids, one of them got into one of the ivy's (Princeton I think) at 16. He wasn't a conspiracy nut, but he had his quirks. He was very concerned about climate change. He bought 'organic' food when he could afford it. That sort of thing. The thing that got me though, was how he instilled in his daughters the belief that all men were dangerous and not to be trusted. I wonder what effect that had on his eldest as she set off for college just a few years into puberty.

I'm not sure which of those traits are quirks.

[Warren]

All the home-schooler's I've known (both of them) have done it because public schools suck. My old roomate's brother home-schooled his kids, one of them got into one of the ivy's (Princeton I think) at 16. He wasn't a conspiracy nut, but he had his quirks. He was very concerned about climate change. He bought 'organic' food when he could afford it. That sort of thing. The thing that got me though, was how he instilled in his daughters the belief that all men were dangerous and not to be trusted. I wonder what effect that had on his eldest as she set off for college just a few years into puberty.

I'm not sure which of those traits are quirks.

It's a matter of extremity isn't it? Anything becomes a quirk when you push it far enough. I found his lefty environmentalism poorly thought out, but he was firmly within the tenets of a large group. The paranoia he instilled in his daughters, exceeded the 'stranger danger' crowd.

[Highway]

My sister-in-law insisted on home-schooling my nephew up until high school, but that's because my sister-in-law is a bitch who can't get along with anyone and takes everything as a slight. Eventually he did go to public high school, but was a year behind.

My wife's niece and nephew were home-schooled as well, but that was for religious reasons.

[Kwix]

I have an acquaintance who lives in Maryland who is currently homeschooling her eldest (the other two are not technically "school aged") specifically because she feels that public schools are not set up to teach things in an appropriate manner. I'm talking Socratic method, revisiting places the kid has trouble, etc. She feels that she can control the quality of education better.

In this state it's a different matter. There are so many rural and remote areas that homeschooling is a matter of course in some communities. Sometimes it is communal schooling and sometimes on a household basis. We have a few different resources for homeschooling like online materials, books, etc. Even the Anchorage public school system offers services to homeschoolers (though if you're the paranoid sort...)

[Aresen]

OK, so a lot of people home-school for ideological or other reasons that have nothing to do with the competence of public schools, but there are some who are concerned about the quality of education. This gets to the root of the broad over-generalization of home-schoolers as portrayed by Team Blue: Not all home-schoolers are fundamentalist zealots as the teachers' unions would have us believe. (The same goes for charter schools.)

TBS, most people are not qualified to home-school a puppy, let alone a child.

[Kolohe]

I give the benefit of the doubt to most home school families, but there was the time a few years ago when I was driving through the middle of nowhere Carolinas, and I came across an non-npr under 92 MHZ radio station that had someone one who advocated that your shouldn't send your kids to public school because it was un-Christian and they'll make your kids little atheists or little islams.

[Tuco]

Most of the people I know who home school their kids do so because they live a long way from a school. Getting a kid up at 4 to bounce over rocks for an hour just to get to the school bus really sucks.

[nicole]

My most articulate response to this rn is aslkrja;wlekjfaskalskjr;wlekjr;ljeflkjasd;lkfja;slkjr;lwkj;ljscreamingemojiajfal;ksjelkafj

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opin ... lasio.html

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York has introduced a plan to change the way students will be chosen for eight of the city’s elite specialized high schools. Under his proposal, 20 percent of seats at the schools would be reserved for students from under-resourced middle schools who score just below the cutoff score on a standardized test, which is now the sole criterion for entry.

Eventually, his goal is to eliminate the exam, called the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. Instead, top students from all of the approximately 600 middle schools in the city would be admitted to the elite high schools. This would make the student bodies of these schools — among them storied institutions such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science — more closely resemble the city’s wider public school population in terms of race and class.

This is not just a good thing. It’s the right thing.

Unfortunately, some Asian-American parents in New York are protesting this proposal, arguing that it is anti-Asian because it would decrease the number of Asian children in elite schools. They are on the wrong side of this educational fight.
...
The plan will simply give kids from a wider variety of backgrounds access to a public resource: an excellent public high school education. This is a public resource, something all New York City families contribute to with their taxes. Only about 5 percent of all New York City high school students are enrolled in a specialized high school and last year half of these kids came from just 21 middle schools.

That means that only five percent of kids are getting access to a valuable public resource. Frankly, Mr. de Blasio’s plan doesn’t fix this problem of inequality. Under his plan, even though the elite high schools would get a bigger range of students, the number of children getting access to this public resource will remain about the same — minuscule.

This is what critics of the plan should be outraged about. All kids deserve a top-rate education in schools with qualified teachers and ample support staff and a wealth of curriculum materials and supplies. All of our schools should be elite schools.

[JasonL]

All of our X should be elite X.

[Fin Fang Foom]

My most articulate response to this rn is aslkrja;wlekjfaskalskjr;wlekjr;ljeflkjasd;lkfja;slkjr;lwkj;ljscreamingemojiajfal;ksjelkafj

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/opin ... lasio.html

[snipped quotes re "ending testing for specialized high schools in favor of a top x% from all public schools" to save space]

I am not really bothered by this. Making all the public schools non-shitty would be a better goal than providing for the few, especially since New York's specialized high schools produce geniuses who do worse than the stupid rich kids from private schools in getting into elite colleges. They should probably just be abolished.

[nicole]

There's no way to make a public school nonshitty if you let everyone in.

[thoreau]

There's no way to make a public school nonshitty if you let everyone in.

We have found a witch; may we burn her?

[Fin Fang Foom]

There's no way to make a public school nonshitty if you let everyone in.

Finland seems to do okay.

[Fin Fang Foom]

There's no way to make a public school nonshitty if you let everyone in.

Finland seems to do okay.

More seriously, it isn't impressive if you take the cream of the crop spend some money on them and leave them as the cream of the crop that still don't get into Harvard. You’d better serve these kids by sending them to WASP summer camps.

[JasonL]

Finland's everyone isn't our everyone. It absolutely is impressive if you give students the opportunity to fly as high as possible. That's mission 1a of education in my book, mission 1 being give everyone a shot to learn basic competency. Note it's "give them a shot" not "close the gap" as a primary mission. The latter tends to involve anchors not wings.

[Fin Fang Foom]

Finland's everyone isn't our everyone. It absolutely is impressive if you give students the opportunity to fly as high as possible. That's mission 1a of education in my book, mission 1 being give everyone a shot to learn basic competency. Note it's "give them a shot" not "close the gap" as a primary mission. The latter tends to involve anchors not wings.

Let's just have all the states close half the gap between the U.S. average and Massachusetts with respect to Pisa scores.

[nicole]

They're going to have a much better chance of getting into Harvard than anyone at an average PS in NYC. From 2016:

n our dataset, the mean public school score is 1273 and the median is 1227, meaning the distribution is skewed slightly to the right with more high-scoring outliers.

The average score at Stuyvesant was over 2100:
https://nycdatascience.com/blog/wp-cont ... op10_2.png

https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student ... ic-school/

[nicole]

I was inspired to look up average SAT scores for my hometown the year I graduated. On the 1600 scale, it was 944, according to the state dept of ed. hahahahahhahahahah

[Fin Fang Foom]

They're going to have a much better chance of getting into Harvard than anyone at an average PS in NYC. From 2016:

n our dataset, the mean public school score is 1273 and the median is 1227, meaning the distribution is skewed slightly to the right with more high-scoring outliers.

The average score at Stuyvesant was over 2100:
https://nycdatascience.com/blog/wp-cont ... op10_2.png

https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student ... ic-school/

Are they getting in? Is it benefitting the city? Why spend a bunch to train a Formula 1 driver when you are going to give him a top-line Camry to drive?

[thoreau]

The quality of instruction depends very much on the students. If you give me a roomful of juniors and seniors, and most of them don't remember most of the key stuff from freshman physics and calculus, I have to spend several weeks reviewing, at the expense of more advanced material. This limits what I can do to properly challenge and stimulate the kids who actually remember something from freshman year.

(Based on a true story.)

Maybe the biggest service that Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and whatnot provide is letting kids take a class where the pace isn't set by somebody whose parents never read to them.

[dhex]

Universal day care would have a far greater impact in NYC than shuffling a few hundred kids to high achieving high schools.

(the cost is of course a different story entirely)