This is very common in the private, for-profit schools in Sweden. The general procedure goes as follows:
1. Spend heavily on marketing to attract 'good students' 2. Avoid selecting 'bad students' 3. Automatically use the scores that follow from this selection to create a feedback loop that keeps bringing in good students 4. Cut as much spending as you can - you're getting paid a set amount of money per student from the government, after all 5. Pocket the difference
Meanwhile, the public schools are not allowed to engage in the same sort of filtering and are hence required to accept the 'bad students', which constrains their resources and creating the opposite feedback loop to what the private for-profit schools have.
Kind of sickening, to be honest.
Can confirm, as a former teacher. There were days when that 1 kid was sick, and the entire class worked completely differently. Suddenly it was possible to teach, the other kids learned, and some of them even said they preferred it that way. Then that 1 kid returned.
In teachers' room, 95% of time spent talking about students, is usually about the same 5 kids.
/s
This effect is already seen heavily in suburbs of Australia, where Asian (particularly Chinese) migrants will buy into suburbs with good schools - pushing out poorer families due to increased pricing.
The fundamental problem is that we need to treat poor behaviour in the same way we treat serious autism - with special schools for those students. The problem is that those schools will get filled with minorities, the whole thing will be attacked as 'racist', and we'll be back to square one.
White people leave an area due to minorities coming. The new area property value increases... More tax money, resources for schools, better teachers get attracted to schools and districts with more resources.
Also a part of my wonders how much influence schools even have on the kids. Families with more resources can pay to get outside help, like enrolling their kids in Kumon...or getting a private SAT tutor.
This is a commonly held myth but it's not backed up by the data. Inner city districts are usually near the top of their state for per pupil spending. What they lack in residential tax base they usually make up for in commercial buildings. All of those high rise office buildings pay lots of property tax and don't send any kids to school.
The problem is that acknowledging this leads to politically incorrect conclusions, so we continue to throw money at education and certain schools.
We'd achieve better outcomes by reducing air and plastic pollution which are shown to have substantial negative potential impacts on intelligence and personality.
How are you distinguishing the two? Show us the evidence, not your conclusions.
Atlanta Public Schools: $15300 Fulton: $12700 Gwinnett: $9500 Forsyth: $9200 Dekalb County: $8800
I left Dekalb for Gwinnett. Gwinnett and Forsyth in general have much better schools, but spending is similar. Atlanta Public Schools has the highest spending in the state, and is the source of the cheating scandal from years back and in general does not have great schools.
does this include donations and other sources of revenue (eg. bake sales)?
Students that for example try to rank high in status by using violence in class or bullying will also always exist. They are extremely costly and teachers are not allowed to incentivize good behavior.
What I mean is that private schools quickly understand just how much damage a student can do and the teacher board / politicians really don’t, they think everything is sunshine and unicorns and put systems in place that are extremely naive.
The system in place only highlights the problem, but it’s not the root cause.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jul/07/oxford-bull...
[0] or, as they are called in the UK, “public schools”, because reasons
The politician Really understand the problem that is the reason their kids are on the private school or them likely live in the ""same district"" then.
i don't understand this position. violence will always exist but we should blame the politicians?
>the teacher board / politicians really don’t ... are extremely naive
where you're mistaken is that
>the root cause
is exactly these kinds of practices that divide people/create inequality.
Yes! Sure, violence will always exist but that doesn’t mean that kids should have to be subjected to it. I was bullied in the “dragged outside of a teachers view and then beaten until I couldn’t move” sense and you know what happened to them… fucking nothing. Like actually literally nothing. Everyone in the school knew all the times it happened including the teachers and administrators but nobody had the power to remove them from school. One of my teachers took pity on me and offered to give me “detention” whenever I needed it. That’s what they could do. My parents fought for years to do something with no avail and then moved me to a private school.
So yeah these practices create inequality because anyone lucky enough to have the means to get out does. As an individual family my parents couldn’t fix my local public school so they did what they could. Therapy was more expensive than the private school tuition.
This kind of sorting could actually be a good thing if resources were adequately devoted toward helping problem students find better outcomes. I wonder, for example, if trades education would be better suited for many of the problem students—allowing of course that there are manifold causes for bad classroom behaviors and poor outcomes.
Education is difficult, and I've snipped a rather lengthy comment that would probably be a waste of time to read. In sum, I think differentiation with strong socio-economic support (i.e., a social respect for all lines work and economic support for them) is probably a better solution than dumping people into classrooms who obviously don't belong there (at least not right now). But this is obviously hard to do (or else we'd probably have done it already).
The quality of the school experience depends as much on the peer group as on the teachers, curriculum, and facilities. Moving troublesome kids to schools with strict discipline can help them in life, too. But even if not, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The troublesome kid goes somewhere, very likely somewhere worse equipped to deal with troublesome kids, not being a fancy school with a ton of money and all.
The system simply denies existence of such kids, and pretends that teachers just need to work harder, or we need to throw more money on that kid, and then everything will magically be ok.
It depends on the numbers, of course. If the 95% of kids only learned 1% more, it wouldn't be worth it.
It's notoriously hard to measure those numbers because everything is confounded by everything else and experiments take decades to run. But I think 20% is plausible and 1% isn't.
Again, it all depends on where the 5% end up. You're not allowed to take them out back and shoot them like an aggressive dog, so are you going to look after them and give them some kind of a future, or are you going to throw kids out onto the street to grow up into career criminals?
Depending on assumptions, it is easy to argue that money is best spent accelerating our brightest minds and giving extra support for the most at-risk, letting the middle atrophy. Or it is best to treat everyone equally, which certainly leaves the top underfulfilled and the bottom underprepared. It's just spitballing.
Your numbers are all invented whole cloth; please don't try to math with them.
More precisely: Why should I believe that the remaining kids learn more? In my experience, everyone learns more when they teach, as it forces them to shore up their assumptions. (When you learn something yourself, you learn one wrong way to do it. When you teach, you learn thirty wrong ways.) Having kids who think differently around for peer exchange is then a good thing overall. The struggling kids have stronger peers around to teach them, and the stronger kids have more chances to teach.
On the other end you game the system by offering scholarships, and by selecting parents who are keen enough to part with a few tens of thousands of pounds a year.
I'm pretty surprised at the outright exam cheating though. My guess would be that if it happened it would be the teachers doctoring the papers without the students seeing it.
My impression of the UK school system is that they've done a lot with reducing bullying in the last couple of decades. It's visible when you visit a school that they care about it, and the kids have assemblies about it, something that would have been left to the kids themselves back in my day.