And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students.
Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.
Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.
Not the way government tends to work in US.
Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district.
And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line.
It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population.
Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work).
Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy.
parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success
I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken.
Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.
My big question is if the money per student is the same, but the outcomes are better, then what can we emulate from the charter or private schools? Or is it selection bias since the parents are involved enough to get them in?
Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates. We've already selected for "parents who give a shit". And frequently for "no IEP or other learning disability". So, kids who are, at worst, average intellect with parents who care enough to fill out some paperwork and drive them to school - those kids are going to succeed almost anywhere.
And I totally understand the desire to get your own children a high quality education. That's a large part of why I moved back to Fairfax County. But, I also feel strongly that strong public schools are a requirement for a healthy society.
Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.
No, it does not, because the following sources of selection bias exist.
(1) Charters select for actively involved parents, because they are not the default-assigned by-residence public schools, and an active choice is necessary to get into the pool,
(2) Charters, because they are not scaled to only take the actively-choosing parents from the catchment area of a typical district school, select for parents with greater means who are able to make a longer travel to the school for drop off, pickup, and other necessary interactions.
(3) There are often biases in the lottery system; even something as simple as giving favorable consideration for having a sibling already in the school reinforces the impact of other biases.
I agree, that we should have good public schools. I feel they do get written off by many of the school choice proposals. I think there could be more support if pairing public school improvements with school choice. If we can improve the public schools to the point of being attractive, then it wouldn't matter if school choice was a thing. It's definitely an unusual paradigm where there is a public option with many people being forced to it for financial reasons, yet the institution is largely unwilling to compete with private offerings.
The system today is optimizing for standardization federally in order to try and fight the natural entropy toward a highly unequal system where rich kids get dramatically better education and there is a downward spiral for poor kids. It's not achieving this goal today, but decentralizing the system would most definitely reinforce unequal outcomes, not avoid it.
That's the goal[1], but what is it constrained by? Primarily that constraint is cost. If you can improve efficiency (improved outcomes per dollar), everyone stands to benefit, especially at the lower end if you can reallocate that money towards them.
The main problem is that school is trying to be utilized to fix multiple issues at home that it simply can't correct for under the current system (yes that other person's example would make it worse). Federal standards and more money won't fix it. Other policy changes might help, but would be difficult to implement.
[1] I'd argue the goal is for each individual to reach their best potential as opposed to equity. Otherwise we end up with perverse systems that limit some upper end students, as we're starting to see innsome areas. That is not good for society/humanity. Equitable resourcing could be good.
The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded. Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason. Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes. Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it.
This feels like youre getting outside the HN guidelines. What framework? Which parts?
"The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded."
Would that money fix anything? Do you have any stats/criteria for how a particular area of the budget is overfunded? Otherwise when taken with your other verbiage, it sounds like just an inflammatory opinion. The US already spends 6.1% of its GDP on education, which is more than most other countries.
"Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason."
This is a bit dramatic given the definition. There are a few states with low teacher pay. However, you have to also look at median income and cost of living. Yeah, the average teacher makes about $50k in MS, but median income for MS is $48k per year with a low cost of living in most of the state. I have friends who have turned down public teaching that would pay more than their private teaching job due to the way the schools are run. Clearly pay is not the main issue in my area.
"Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes."
In general, you are right. In the context of this thread, those would be test scores, graduation rate, job/college placement rates.
"Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it."
No, not everyone knows it. Care to explain? It seems the test measure what the kids are supposed to know at a specific level. Are there some problems with things like teaching to the test instead of teaching for durable knowledge or love of learning, sure. But if you know how to read/write/etc at your grade level, then your scores will be fine. Seem like one of the best comparisons we have. Are there better alternatives?
It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable depending on where you are.
This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement.
The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.
FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.
I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.
I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.
No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.
The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.
Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.
Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.
My only chance for a normal life and education was public school.
A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The only option their children have is public school. Their future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to invest in them so that they even have a future, one that isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.
You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids? All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system. Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.
The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense of swathes of people like me who were at least average intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor mother.
If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then let us fix it.
But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom 10% deserve their hard lives.
Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.
The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.
You’ll know this by the people who campaign for voucher programs that we’re all told are evil somehow. Yet the goal of vouchers is to make all options available to everyone.
Without vouchers, all options are only available to those with financial options.
You can go to public school, private school or a home school program. If you want a better public school, you have to move to a better rated school district. In order to do that, you have to be able to afford it.
Without vouchers, poor families only option is public school where they currently live. People opposed to vouchers have 1 goal: preserve the status quo. They’ll tell you absolutely anything to convince you otherwise too.
How exactly does that work?
We homeschool and I pay property taxes that fund our local school just like everyone else in town. I pay for services that I don't use and can be used for other children if the powers that be decide to allocate it that way.
School choice/vouchers defund public schools proportional to loss of public school responsibility for students.
Besides, it is pretty said that the best counter argument against charter schools is that parents will take their fair share of funding and use it to buy a much better education for their children.
To your point about charter schools, there is a strong argument to be made that when parents have a choice where there kids go, public schools will have to make sure they are providing more academic opportunities if they don't want to risk losing the academically minded families (and their money). That seems like it would be a good thing for everyone.
I voted to raise property tax where I live specifically to improve the funding situation for our struggling public schools - I attended a great public school district growing up (because, surprise: my parents could afford to move into the district).
The funding situation needs to be fixed across the board, because indeed everyone attending public school deserves as good an education as I received, but the way the system functions currently is that poor areas get poor schools (at least in the midwest where I've lived).
So, while I whole-heartedly support education reform and improving funding as public policies: I still wouldn't send my own kids to the public school district where I live; they're terrible. I wish they weren't.
My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell.
Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there.
Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise.
You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.
The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed.
In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government.
Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to navigate the political system is the selection factor. Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at educating kids", and while you do have means to measure performance, those same means are also decided upon by the very same people being effectively measured, so there's an incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have prevented it from happening.
I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the altar of "the other team's" apparatus.
As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15 year old honda while putting my future children through a homeschool program regardless of what happens.
People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education.
> Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.
Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.