> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school.

Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my experience.

>National Merit Scholar

Given how rare this is, this is much more of a function of IQ than school quality. If you fill a school, regardless of quality, with smart kids, grades, ratings, other other benchmarks of quality will probably all go up.

I went to a school where National Merit Scholars were a dime a dozen: student performance there was almost independent of the teaching that they got.

“In a small town” basically covers it right there.

That's not particularly descriptive, because the high school in my small town of 25,000 was in the middle of the LA metro area. It is most often referred to as a small town by LA locals but it's high school class alone is easily the size of a "small town" in rural areas, where you might need a car just to get to your nearest neighbor.

“ in general.” Implies it’s not a blanket statement for all. Of course there is the exception.

If you have a learning disability and your only choice is public school, your pretty screwed.

"It worked for me, so it must be working for most others."

We should increase teacher pay / benefits to attract better talent.

At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.

I think you’ll find those parents who don’t don’t have the time to engage with their kids are working far more than 40 hours. The lucky ones are probably working 60-70 for a tech company and making bank, the unlucky ones are working multiple minimum wage jobs to just live with the basics.

Definitely agree with you, going over 30 hrs a week or whatever the new full time definition would be should always cause overtime pay. There are so many loopholes to avoid overtime these days (classify employee as X, etc etc).

"We need more teachers and smaller classes."

That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.

Another approach could be:

High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble.

Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.

I'm not an expert on education, or on public policy.

I see people on twitter and reddit bitch about having to learn calculus and never using it.

But you know? I don't remember how to use calculus at this moment either, but I remember concepts of it measuring infinitesimal increments of change, and how derivatives and integrations relate to rates of change.

I don't remember the mechanisms of all my teachings in school, but it made me appreciate bridges, combustion engines, biology and literature.

The honest question is: How do we determine when a child/teenager has no capacity or will to understand the beauty or utility of advanced learning, and what do we do with them?

Especially as automation takes over in the next 30 years and we have millions more out of work because we don't need taxis, truck drivers, farmers, or 60% of food service?

You need some kind of VoTech and continuing Ed for people without degrees and white collar portable skills. Otherwise you get legions of disaffected populist voters when the economic tides shift against the only industry they know how to work in.

I think this is already happening. High school is not helping…

A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.

I agree with you but we need to re-think education. The current education system is not working in general. Class rooms are over crowded and not enough teachers.

A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.

Looking at the US from central Europe, I see so much weird stuff. Like elected boards of education, at county level, that have actual power. Just why? There is so much broken with the German system (early selection of school types in 4th grade, social unfairness, lack of digitalisation), and still it is giving everyone a rather solid basic education of 9 years, one you can only opt out by leaving Germany.

IMHO, this is a good thing. Same for France, Austria and most other EU countries I know of. Like healthcare, a public system is working in most developed countries. Except the US.

For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.

If you think that giving less money to struggling public services is a way to improve those services, then you are part of the problem. Political opportunists rely on that line of thinking to put public services into a death spiral, and their failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Its probably because obviously not all districts are like this, and its likely that the author's entire school isnt even like this. The blog points out small parts of a single school district in the entire country.

Giving struggling schools less money when they require larger and more diverse funding almost definitely isnt the answer. The average public school teacher still spends a huge amount of money every year to buy stuff for their class to use, and we expect them to continually do that throughout their career.

Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception.

Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)

That depends what you mean by "well".

"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.

They punish this skill. I was literally expelled from my high school during senior year for arguing with a teacher over her misinterpretation of something stated pretty plainly in the textbook. The teacher got furious when I stated confidently that she was wrong, and within about 15 minutes I had been taken to the principal’s office and told to never tell a teacher that they are wrong, to which I said “even if they are wrong?” and she expelled me on the spot. The expulsion was overturned about a week later but it was a terrible week for me and my parents, and I got pretty behind in my schoolwork because of it. And to be clear the problem was that the teacher was saying something different from the textbook, so this was not a subjective matter, or a question of knowledge exactly. If she had just said “ignore the textbook” it would have been fine.

I had something similar happen to me

in retrospect it was a valuable lesson

I think you are working in the right direction, but you have to include lies that are believed by the teller, semi-lies that were honestly conceived but lose their earnestness through determined avoidance of self-questioning, and even honest but harmful mistakes.

No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD.

If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.

Public schools where I live in Texas are great. Much better than the $33k per year school we had in Silicon Valley. The places were they seem broken are in big city districts where certain political factions, specifically teacher unions, get outsized influence on policy. I saw this up close when I lived in Jersey City and was considering a run for school board on Mayor Fulup’s slate of candidates. After being warned about “crossing the unions” and getting into tiffs with the NAACP representative, I discovered that many of these groups don’t care a lick about education, only money and power. And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands. Those suburban districts spend less than the districts that perpetually fail. There are policy problems, not financial ones.

>And it isn’t about funding: look at the per pupil expenditures in DC or New York, and compare them to Austin suburbs like Leander, or Houston suburbs like the Woodlands

Spending per pupil can be a deceiving statistic due to the vastly different needs between poor/middle-class/wealthy students

For people not aware of the geography referenced here: Leander and The Woodlands are both affluent areas outside of the major cities referenced.

I would suggest that the students here are doing well due to a combo of the following factors:

Smart parents live here, and they have smart kids

Rich parents spend less time fretting about paying bills and more time helping kids with homework

One (rich) parent works, one stay-at-home parent takes care of the home -> more time with the kids

One parent is involved with the PTA, which correlates well with student success

And to he clear, I'm not casting judgment. I live in Frisco, Tx. We are enjoying ALL of the above benefits

As someone who lives in Leander, I would say Westlake is the affluent area of Austin and Leander is the up and coming suburban middle to upper middle class area. Leander ISD has some great schools and some bad schools and historically wasn't great.

Adding on:

Well educated parents are more likely to have the skills themselves to help with homework and are more likely to put more emphasis on academic performance.

> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD.

Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-average salaries, and teaches topics from the last century.

My university experience was simply a continuation of highschool and being treated like a child. Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding, attendance was obligatory, tech was sometimes >20 years old, and so on and so forth.

Even the systems and curriculums within states (!= country) can vary pretty heavily. The bologna reform supposedly made comparing degrees between countries better, but a bachelor in mechanical engineering may mean something entirely different in Poland and Spain.

Better doesn't automatically mean good.

Wow I studied in France and live in Hong Kong. What you describe is so very close to HK where I have a daughter to raise.

In France, school is relaxed. It's more about making you an aware citizen than a calculator. The parents always feel the schools are mediocre because they fail all sort of international grading competitions.

Universities are inexistant on the Shanghai Index. You go to class if you want, exams can be compensated by good personal projects (I hated theorical geometry but loved OpenGL so much, that I passed the 3D geometry class with a 10% mark at the exam and a 95% mark at the OpenGL 3D engine semester project that implemented the concept I could not find pleasure in memorizing formally).

Now I have a choice to put my kid in the HK/Chinese system, the French system or the UK/American one, and ... frankly Im so shocked by the lack of focus on kind citizenship, political duty, critical thinking and no alternative to the ever-parent-scaring french "school is not to give you a job, but to give you knowledge" that I still put her in the French system which I used to think was shit.

But well it's not public and some of the things you said on public school apply to France too (unmotivated teachers, often manipulated by unions to think they're so underpaid they have no choice but to interrupt and sacrifice their kids education to fight for their stolen basic rights)

> Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding

This was the biggest part that got me. I thought university was a place to actually learn things.

It turned out that it's a place for you to rote learn all the required material without any understanding. I saw it firsthand with my friends, who only knew how to follow the steps they'd been taught to solve problems.

"Excellent" is a relative term. The average school is going to be average by definition. If you focus on excellence, you are focusing on the best-performing schools and ignoring the rest. If you are interested in the quality of the education the majority of kids are receiving, you should pay more attention to the average unexceptional schools, where most kids meet the expectations but do not excel in anything. If the expectations are too low, there is probably something wrong with the administration or the level of funding, or with the status of teaching as a profession.

Are you aware that most of the San Francisco Bay Area is not actually in the city of San Francisco?

The fundamental problem is that formal schooling is basically a waste of time for a reasonable fraction of the population.

Do you need any more than basic literacy and numeracy to be a retail worker, cook, laborer, driver?

These students would be much better off learning a hands-on trade, or in the workforce.

The school leaving and employment age should be moved to 14. Expulsions should also be properly enforced, including for non-White children.

This is kind of the approach that Switzerland is taking (disclaimer; I'm Swiss), although I would not formulate it as drastically. It depends a bit on the region but school is required until 14-ish, after that there's a split for "gymnasium", which is continued full-time-school, around 20% of the students do this (again, varies by region). The remaining 80% start an "apprenticeship", where they work 40-60% on a job, and spend the rest of the time in school (where there's about a 50-50 split between general education and job-specific education). Whenever someone doing an apprenticeship figures out that he wants to go back towards higher education, there are plenty of routes to do so.

In my opinion it works quite nicely. The 80-20-split for gymnasium (which requires an entry-exam, but again, region-dependant) ensures a certain level for students in gymnasium, and the "job schools" for the apprenticeships allow for job-specific education. All in all, I consider it a pretty decent system.

The USA is actively ending those programs because all of the people in the 'gymnasiums' are Jewish/White/Asian, and this is seen as politically/socially unacceptable.

What’s the cut-off though? Kindergarten is clearly too little and 12th grade Calculus is used by so few.

Furthermore, there are intangible social outcomes of having kids in school for 12-13 years that can’t simply be ignored.

> We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes.

NAEP scores have been more or less flat among 17 year olds since 1970. During that period inflation adjusted spending per pupil almost tripled.

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf

> The 0.075 figure reported here suggests that there is essentially no link between state education spending (which has exploded) and the performance of students at the end of high school (which has generally stagnated or declined).