bluepenquin
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4-Time VolleyTalk Poster of the Year (2019, 2018, 2017, 2016), All-VolleyTalk 1st Team (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016) All-VolleyTalk 2nd Team 2023
Posts: 12,938
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Post by bluepenquin on Feb 15, 2021 11:35:17 GMT -5
While we are on school choice - and bringing in teacher unions and the Democratic Party - I find this article rather interesting. I don't know how 'progressive' this writer is - but I do believe the education of parents kids will trump politics. The way many urban and Red State's have handled public school during COVID is pushing kids with richer parents to private schools. And in my opinion - is exposing the inherent problems with not allowing school choice for poorer kids. Also some pretty big shots at the teacher unions in the article - from someone who claims to have picketed with teacher unions in the past. rmbodenheimer.medium.com/a-progressive-parents-rant-about-the-politics-surrounding-school-reopening-a816cae963fd
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Post by donut on Feb 15, 2021 11:46:00 GMT -5
Yeah, I still haven't heard a good reason for why when we look at countries like Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., (countries with some of the best education systems in the word), we should go "nah, f*ck them, school choice is the answer." bump
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Post by mervinswerved on Feb 15, 2021 11:50:23 GMT -5
I'm going to try and put on my libertarian brain this morning. What happens when the rural high school 30 minutes from my house "fails?" The one that serves kids from an hour away who'd either have to drive another 30 minutes to the one in my neighborhood or . . . maybe just drop out of school. Where do those kids go? Certainly not the same kind of choices for rural kids. I guess if a rural school sucks - some investor could see the opportunity to bring in a better school. Investor?
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Post by n00b on Feb 15, 2021 12:24:20 GMT -5
Yeah, I still haven't heard a good reason for why when we look at countries like Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., (countries with some of the best education systems in the word), we should go "nah, f*ck them, school choice is the answer." What are they doing that we aren’t? We’re #2 in the world in spending per pupil but are still behind. What’s the reason? www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019-8
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Post by c4ndlelight on Feb 15, 2021 12:26:43 GMT -5
Yeah, I still haven't heard a good reason for why when we look at countries like Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., (countries with some of the best education systems in the word), we should go "nah, f*ck them, school choice is the answer." What are they doing that we aren’t? We’re #2 in the world in spending per pupil but are still behind. What’s the reason? www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019-8Well for one, they're not spending billions on school sports. They're also not asking schools to cover social service programs their societies take care of otherwise.
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Post by n00b on Feb 15, 2021 12:30:01 GMT -5
BTW, the first thing we need to do - stop tying education to property taxes and where you live. Money should be tied to the kid at the state level with the kid having the opportunity to go to any of those schools. Heck, just make them all public schools as they are now - and this would be an improvement. The keys being, 1) kids/parents have a choice, and 2) schools have an incentive to be good - otherwise kids will stop going and that school will go out of business. Stop subsidizing (or trying to fix) failing schools and allow them to be replaced by better ones. Hmmm. If a local community wants to invest more into their education than a different community I think they should be allowed to do that. I’m all for doing things to make the worst public schools better. But if all funding is at the state level, I’d have to think that it would also make the best public schools worse. I don’t think that’s a good trade off and would ultimately push more families to private schools.
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Post by mikegarrison on Feb 15, 2021 12:34:53 GMT -5
Of course the problem with assuming private enterprise will respond to stuff like this is that responding to it is unprofitable. It's like the rural mail delivery problem. The US mail delivers to rural addresses because they are required to. It's their mandate under law. But private delivery services either would have to charge much higher rates or simply not deliver there at all -- or just rely on the USPS to do it for them, which is often what they do now. That pushes their costs for handling this unprofitable business over to the USPS while they can skim off the more profitable market.
Private schools often do the same. They take the most profitable students and leave the more costly ones to let the public schools deal with.
You see the same issue with mandatory car insurance. States require all drivers to have car insurance, but not all drivers are profitable to the insurance companies. So states have to require companies to participate in high-risk pools, and even so those drivers must pay a lot more for less coverage.
Now you could say that these people have earned it, by getting DUIs or causing too many accidents or whatever. But have disabled kids "earned" paying more for less education? How about kids with mental illness? Abused kids with emotional problems? You think private schools want to have to serve those markets? Most of them are not interested. Sure, it's a market niche, but it's not a profitable market niche unless they get a huge amount of money to serve it.
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Post by n00b on Feb 15, 2021 12:41:43 GMT -5
I can't believe those school districts didn't think of that! Well what the hell do you expect? You toss out "failing school districts" with no explanation. How are they failing? What's going wrong? If you can just hypothetically specify that they are failing with no further explanation as to why, then I have the equal right to just say "make them stop failing" with just as little explanation. If you want to suggest exactly how they are "failing", then we'll proceed from there. But it sure sounds like you are just assuming that public schools "fail". I have no clue what’s wrong with school districts that have low graduation rates and don’t offer many honors or AP courses. Sometimes it’s funding. Sometimes it isn’t. Some public schools are failing at providing a quality education. Most are doing a good job, some are great. People have likely been trying to fix the ones doing a bad job for many years, but it doesn’t improve. So those kids are stuck.
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Post by oldnewbie on Feb 15, 2021 12:45:39 GMT -5
BTW, the first thing we need to do - stop tying education to property taxes and where you live. Money should be tied to the kid at the state level with the kid having the opportunity to go to any of those schools. Heck, just make them all public schools as they are now - and this would be an improvement. The keys being, 1) kids/parents have a choice, and 2) schools have an incentive to be good - otherwise kids will stop going and that school will go out of business. Stop subsidizing (or trying to fix) failing schools and allow them to be replaced by better ones. Hmmm. If a local community wants to invest more into their education than a different community I think they should be allowed to do that. I’m all for doing things to make the worst public schools better. But if all funding is at the state level, I’d have to think that it would also make the best public schools worse. I don’t think that’s a good trade off and would ultimately push more families to private schools. It doesn't necessarily make the best schools worse, but it does make those schools more expensive because the parents are expected to pick up the difference through school foundations and the endless fundraisers (which I detest).
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Post by donut on Feb 15, 2021 12:54:14 GMT -5
Yeah, I still haven't heard a good reason for why when we look at countries like Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., (countries with some of the best education systems in the word), we should go "nah, f*ck them, school choice is the answer." What are they doing that we aren’t? We’re #2 in the world in spending per pupil but are still behind. What’s the reason? www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019- ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/Here's a good place to start^^ It's just puzzling to me that we can learn stories from our international peers in this arena, yet for some reason American exceptionalism causes us to advocate for a solution not seen elsewhere. It also suggests to me that posters aren't doing their research when they advocate for the "best solution" and are simply relying on ideological biases. I'm not necessarily an expert in this space, but no other country seems to have said: education is a problem? Let's let the market solve it. It seems to be quite the opposite.
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Post by oldnewbie on Feb 15, 2021 13:20:50 GMT -5
Yeah, I still haven't heard a good reason for why when we look at countries like Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., (countries with some of the best education systems in the word), we should go "nah, f*ck them, school choice is the answer." What are they doing that we aren’t? We’re #2 in the world in spending per pupil but are still behind. What’s the reason? www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019-8Articles like this are useless unless they give you a whole lot more information that they rarely do. When comparing budgets, what is the money spent on? Are we comparing apples to apples? We use the school system as a social safety net (meals programs), day care (before and after school programs) and have a heterogenous population that routinely supports dozens of languages. How much money is actually spent in the classroom and what is it spent on? Second, what do the test numbers really mean? Every country listed above is somewhat to almost entirely homogenous (Finland, Poland, South Korea, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Taiwan). It is a lot easier to set national standards for a homogenous population. Those numbers appear to be averages. What is the distribution? Are kids with learning disabilities and other issues that affect their schooling equally represented in the numbers for each country? Our numbers may be substantially better or worse than they seem from this article, we really can't tell.
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Post by n00b on Feb 15, 2021 13:29:02 GMT -5
ncee.org/what-we-do/center-on-international-education-benchmarking/top-performing-countries/Here's a good place to start^^ It's just puzzling to me that we can learn stories from our international peers in this arena, yet for some reason American exceptionalism causes us to advocate for a solution not seen elsewhere. It also suggests to me that posters aren't doing their research when they advocate for the "best solution" and are simply relying on ideological biases. I'm not necessarily an expert in this space, but no other country seems to have said: education is a problem? Let's let the market solve it. It seems to be quite the opposite. I just read through Canada and it’s a whole lot of nothing. “ Canada has much in common with its larger neighbor to the south, but the performance of its students has recently significantly outpaced that of the U.S.” They say there is no federal level education ministry. While I agree, I don’t think that’s what is making the difference. “In 2013, (Ontario’s) Ministry also revamped teacher education, lengthening the training and the practicum period and cutting the slots available, in an effort to increase quality of teachers and reduce oversupply.” It’s hard to know what to take from this without knowing how those training and practicum periods compare to the norms in American states. But i would think it would be difficult to get those changes thru unions (longer schooling, fewer teachers). There has been a recent focus on equity and expanding early childhood education. Ok, makes sense, but those changes wouldn’t have shown up in the current PISA scores yet. They mention relying on the expertise of individual teachers instead of top down directives. I agree with that. But it’s not like there’s some grand answer of why Canada’s education system is producing better results.
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Post by mervinswerved on Feb 15, 2021 14:00:23 GMT -5
If only there were multiple academic fields devoted to studying these phenomenon.
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Post by donut on Feb 15, 2021 14:05:06 GMT -5
Jesus Christ, n00b. I literally said "here's a good place to start" largely because I thought the NCEE did a good job of providing high-level overviews. You also clearly only read the "Overview" page (for one single country).
It's going to be hard to engage with you on this if you aren't at least going to pretend to make a good faith effort.
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Post by oldnewbie on Feb 15, 2021 14:13:38 GMT -5
While we are on school choice - and bringing in teacher unions and the Democratic Party - I find this article rather interesting. I don't know how 'progressive' this writer is - but I do believe the education of parents kids will trump politics. The way many urban and Red State's have handled public school during COVID is pushing kids with richer parents to private schools. And in my opinion - is exposing the inherent problems with not allowing school choice for poorer kids. Also some pretty big shots at the teacher unions in the article - from someone who claims to have picketed with teacher unions in the past. rmbodenheimer.medium.com/a-progressive-parents-rant-about-the-politics-surrounding-school-reopening-a816cae963fdThe article talks about blue states having a knee-jerk reaction to Trump. I think that is probably overly simplistic and a big contributor is that big cities with big, dense school districts have different concerns than much smaller and often rural school districts. That said, it's not like I trust the democrats not to over-politicize the issue. We can never know, but I wonder what would have happened if Trump had acted like a leader and gone all in on closing the borders, social distancing, no large gatherings, masking, shutting down schools, massive production of test kits and masks. All the things we know could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks. I wonder if the democrats would then have been the party pushing to open schools and get people back to work.
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