There is a difference between “rejecting lower performing students” and “separating consistently disruptive students from those who are not”. Should public schools attempt to do the latter?
I submit to you that there is rarely any difference. Those are typically the exact same students, and school administration actions can serve more than one motive.
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She sounds like she’s describing the utterly shitty state ‘Secondary Modern’ school I was consigned and condemned to attend in the 80’s in the UK.
Even though our local area here in NZ is relatively socio-economically deprived, I thank our lucky stars that our children’s state schooling here is so much more pleasant than that.
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You want people to invest their children, into a utopian scheme, with limited chance of payout. But I don’t think that is the answer. I went to a couple of those crappy schools, and my presence as a high achieving well behaved student did not materially change the educational experience for the less advantaged or poorly behaved kids. Maybe it made some difference in test or graduation stats.
My personal experience is that by the time a kid is approaching teenage years, they are already well on their way to academic success or failure. The kids who are uncooperative and do not pay attention or do the work are at that point so far behind the motivated kids that it is unrealistic to have them in the same classroom. And every year, that difference grows.
I did mention that my kids attended different districts of public schools. I might not have noted that the worst of those districts spends much more per student, and has better facilities. Neither is anything like as bad as the ones I attended.
Parents have a responsibility to prepare their kids to succeed in school, or at least to not disrupt the progress of those who are there to learn. Plenty of parents do not do this. So you have sixth and seventh graders who are functionally illiterate and continually disruptive, sitting in the same classroom with kids who already know the material, and are quietly reading so that they won’t be bored out of their minds, and hope that they can get home without being assaulted. Both of those sets of students are wasting their time in that classroom. there is a middle group, and I guess they are the ones the teacher is focused on. But the disruptive and illiterate kids should be somewhere getting remedial education and behavioral intervention, and the motivated kids should be off somewhere exploring their full potentials.
The best school I attended started the kids learning Latin and French in third grade. The days were long, the lessons hard, and the dress and conduct code very strict. It was a wonderful school, but the kids showed up motivated and prepared from day one. But the point of the school was not separation from the population, it was excellence and exploiting each student’s full potential. There were a number of students there under scholarship, and I guess those were the “cream” you referred to. They probably would have done well in public schools, but they had the opportunities to absolutely thrive at our school. But you cannot just grab kids at random and stick them in a place like that, with any expectation of success. And I think it is great that such schools exist.
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That’s one of the things I really like about schools in NZ. They aren’t locked campuses and as a parent I can go and see what they’re up to. I just need to email the teacher and ask to sit in.
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I wonder how many people here who
(a) get royally pissed off when irresponsible parents let their children run completely wild in a restaurant, a theatre, or an airplane
(b) think it’s perfectly all right to force your kids and mine to sit in a room with those parents’ uncontrollable offspring for 35 hours a week, 40 weeks a year??
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No I don’t. I want people to force our government to redirect money it is currently wasting on dystopian, scientifically disproven nonsense, to put that money in a well demonstrated scheme that has a very well understood very high chance of payout. I want everyone to get better schools. To do that, we have to stop spending tax dollars on economically segregated schools, and eliminate entrance requirements that preselect for economic status.
Many of them are not capable of doing this. So is it OK to punish the children (which will in turn damage our economy) because the parents didn’t do the right thing? This simply ensures that the cycle of ignorance continues - and the way we do it now, it spreads.
That’s a separate, although certainly related, problem. Let’s stay off that one for now, merely noting that it should not be possible - they should still be in 2nd grade if they can’t read or write.
Although you have made this statement in a very specifically segregationist way - you are openly advocating “separate and not equal” and you’re liable to take some flak for that - I think the meaning behind it is more important than whether you conformed to the niceties of phrasing. 
So let me just say that there’s no need to have separate schools for the unruly in order to maintain a learning environment, and that there’s no need to have separate schools in order to give the best students the best possible chance. What’s needed to achieve both of those things is optimal student/teacher ratio. No more than 11 students per teacher, no less than two teachers per class. The problems you are talking about are all caused by teachers being overwhelmed by the needs of the students. They aren’t caused by the children of the poor being unworthy of the education provided the children of the upper classes.
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I suffered that one the entirety of secondary school. I knew the only way to get the bullying to stop would be to do sufficient harm to someone that it put them out of action and discouraged the others. But could never quite bring myself to ambush one of the bullies with a brick to the back of the head …
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Parents have a responsibility to prepare their kids to succeed, full stop. If more parents (or parental surrogates) did their job, i.e., to raise a decent human being who is responsible for themselves and their actions, there would be less of the problems mentioned by @lolipop_jones!
/rant. (~And get off my lawn!~)*
*I was told this morning that the tilde is the “sarcasm & irony font” symbol. So I guess I can stop designing a sarcasm font.
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Or, because as you point out below salaries of most primary and secondary teachers are rarely at all decent, working a different job, such as waiting tables.
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“Optimal” implies that this has been studied in a systematic way. Citations?
A quick search gave me this, which admittedly is several years old:
https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-around-the-world/?mcubz=1
The USA is pretty much at the median point worldwide with regard to class size, and nobody, but nobody, is at eleven.
Edit:
Pretty much my entire experience of unmanageable, bullying, disruptive middle schoolers is based on middle class white kids. That mind trick won’t work on me.
This reminds me of the people who come into discussions about teen pregnancy with “well those girls shouldn’t have gotten pregnant!”.
Sure, you’re absolutely right, but that particular flavor of blame-the-victims moral grandstanding solves exactly zero problems and contributes nothing to a discussion of what to do NOW.
We’re talking about NOW, not a mythical past where everyone had white, protestant, employed, hard-working, teetotaling parents who did everything right 10 years ago. We’re talking about a system that purposely gives the kids who need education the most, the worst education we are allowed to give them, in a false belief that this will somehow benefit the kids who are better off already.
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I’ll clarify.
We should be actively finding out what the optimal student/teacher ratio is.
My extensive observations of the schools that are and aren’t succeeding in my area (Northern Delaware) leads me to believe that 11 to 1 is an optimal balance between what we wish to achieve and what we wish to spend. I would be happy to learn more.
My children have spent quite a few years in classes with 11 to 1 student/teacher ratios or even better. Part of the time in the local hippy school (where that’s normal, because they spent 50 years figuring out what works) and part of the time in a poverty public school. Courses in the public comprehensive schools that require prior advantage, like higher math, robotics and computer programming, are not well attended - so while the average class size for ESL might be 30 to 35, the average class size for robotics II is more like seven to ten.
Not sure I’d send my kids there in year one, or year twenty…
Honestly I agree with you regarding year one - and I had my doubts about year 30. But Cory Doctorow wrote an article that convinced me to give it a try, oddly enough - for which I have thanked him.
OK, gotta go, gotta rescue a stranded motorist.
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I wasn’t talking about any past, mythical or not.
My past involved hypocritical parents who raised me mostly according to Dr. Spock, and life as a gawky, ugly, straight A student in 50-child-per-class Catholic schools. And my past 10 years ago involved helping raise the child of my boyfriend’s teen daughter, because said daughter was in crisis again. I get that not everyone can do the job successfully.
I was addressing a partial solution. Educate the society to understand that parents are responsible for their children, that it’s in everyone’s best interests to raise decent human beings.
Start with programs to mentor young or inexperienced parents; encourage involvement of the family and the community. If part of the answer to the school part is decreasing the student to teacher ratio, maybe part of the answer to the life and parenting problem is increasing the adult to child ratio outside school.
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You’ve obviously made a personal decision (with the other parent I presume) to send your kids to the best place for their education, where you know that the other kids are there because their parents believe it is the best place for their education.
Good for you. Seriously.
Your honor, I rest my case.
I don’t mean that in a culturally or racially segregationalist way. There are kids of every sort who have what it takes to attain academic excellence. It certainly does not correlate with income. I guess wealthy parents can afford to get the remedial lessons for an undisciplined student, and tutoring to maybe get them to the level of their peers. A poor parent might not have the time or money to seek those out for their kid.
I guess we differ on our basic view of humanity. I do think that almost any kid has the potential to achieve greatness, but a large part of that in my opinion is work ethic and basic morality that has to come from the parents, unless you advocate some kind of state intervention in early childhood.
Effective student/teacher ratio absolutely depends on student behavior. I don’t have quick access to my Japanese class pictures, but a web search indicates that the average class size there is 32. That seems about what I remember. And the education was first rate. But even the smaller class size in South Dade public schools might as well have been on another planet from school in Japan.
@lolipop_jones, I don’t understand your meaning. Help me out here.
You’re mistaken. Academic achievement correlates extremely strongly with family wealth, and has been repeatedly shown to correlate with wealth in pretty much every study that has ever been performed, since the 1960s and right up to today. There is an enormous quantity of data available, not only nationally and internationally but also from my local school system, that you can check yourself.
It is true that there are idiots born to the wealthy, and geniuses born among the poor. However, the latter are outliers, because poverty and deprivation and lack of early exposure to intellectual stimulus prevents academic achievement. On average, academic excellence does correlate with income. It’s a well proven, extremely close correlation.
And when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. A child that grows up in a house full of books and tools where people speak casually in an educated fashion on complex topics and make erudite references to history, physics, philosophy and classical literature in normal conversation is going to be “prepped” for academic instruction in a way that a child who grows up a latch key kid in a ghetto with parents who have to dodge gunfire when walking between minimum wage jobs, or a child who grows up abused and essentially unparented in a crack house. And while most kids will be somewhere in between those extremes, in general their parent’s wealth predicts pretty accurately how well they will be able to adapt to academic environments.
And as for segregation - in practice economic segregation is more than 90% identical with racial segregation. The poor are disproportionately non-white, and thus my own state - thanks to the spread of magnet, charter and private schools - is still unable to achieve racial desegregation in education despite trying to do so for almost 40 years.
I don’t know. We might not differ as much as you think. I agree that almost any kid has the potential to achieve greatness, but I disagree that we should throw our hands up in the air and ignore social and cultural trends that are actually exacerbating problems of cyclic poverty and miseducation.
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You said upthread:
However, your personal actions in seeking out the best possible education for your child and being willing to pay a large premium for that choice exemplify the reasons why millions of parents will never acquiesce to your proposed educational reform.
