i sympathize with you, i never learned how to write so i just type out random strings of letters and hope for the best 
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No, the problem is (at least as far as the national debate is concerned) poor schools. There is a direct correlation between income and academic performance. Which is why measurement is so tricky. If you use it as a basis for school funding, rich schools will get richer.
A broken school is a symptom, not the cause, of a broken community.
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This sounds like a fantastic school, but itâs losing out to the pressure being placed on it by the dictates of the system.
There is also a direct correlation between academic performance and student interest. There is very little public schools can do about income, and an immense amount they can do about student interest.
Actually, if we are talking about poor kids not becoming poor adults, high quality preschool along with smart social programs have a long-term impact. Itâs one of the few things that do. There are no quick fixes. It will take a generation to rebuild a community.
Itâs easy to say that school arenât motivating students, but we live in a political world where schools on the bubble feel like they have to teach to the test or have their funding cut. If we want to allow schools to experiment, we must change the politics. How does a state senator who usually at best has a juris doctorate (and at worse a high diploma) know how to teach our kids better than the professionals?
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This is hardly settled science. âHigh quality preschoolâ doesnât even have an agreed-upon definition. Donât get me wrong. I support the idea of providing free (and high quality!) daycare for lower and middle class families, but I think itâs premature to sell the idea based on very little science.
I agree 100% with your first two sentences. Your question raises more questions. What do âprofessionalsâ agree on? Very little, it turns out. Do the opinions of these professionals matter more than the opinions of students and parents? All the time? Or does it depend on the opinion and the situation?
Education is a very, very subjective topic in important ways. There are so many opinions. In mine, the most important opinion belongs to the student.
There are insufficient data there to form a conclusion. I think youâre implying that as schools desegregated that there was white flight to private education? If so, Iâm not saying youâre wrong (and I actually suspect youâre correct), but to really prove it we need the denominators as well â the populations of White and Minority school-aged children normally resident in Seattle for each of those years, so we can plot the proportion enrolled in public schooling for each group over time.
Most poor, urban folks in the U.S. are Democrats, and they are clamoring to get into charter schools. So much so that there are lotteries to get into them, with only enough spots for a small fraction of the families who want to get into one.
Wanting the best possible education for your kids really has nothing to do with political ideology.
This is the article the image is from:
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/resources/cep/ejournal/v002n001/a014.shtml
First, as indicated in Figure 1 below, in what some describe as âwhite flightâ from Seattle Public Schools, the percentage of white students enrolled has steadily declined since the late 1960âs, while the percentage of students of color has increased. In the year 2000, 70.1% of the residents of Seattle were white, yet accounted for only 40% of the students in Seattle Public Schools (US Census Bureau, Census 2000). While some of this may be due to a demographic shift in the type of white families moving into Seattle (those not having children), an important factor to consider is that Seattle has one of the highest rates of private school enrollment in the country, which has been between 25-30% for the last two decades, corresponding closely with the implementation of district-wide mandatory busing in 1978 (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 25, 2005).
Yeah, I think I already agreed with you on that 
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Thank you for expanding, Iâm convinced.
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Only those snacks? Are because plenty of children come to school hungry. They are simply not going to learn if they are starving in their seats. And that colored paper is useful in the teachers tool set of engaging students. You have to remember that we are not sitting there expecting teachers to sit and lecture because that doesnât work. And we want to alter their pay based on performance on standardized testing that would reflect the lack of engagement that pure lecture brings. No we are expecting them to be Bill Nye in the classroom. They can not afford not to spend their own money in order to engage their students.
As for this idea that entertaining or engaging education is a american trope. Bull. The Scandinavian models turn our better educated and better adjusted students because they make time for recess, they donât load students down with homework and they do not overcrowd classrooms and that leads to more engagement from teachers.
A lot of what is being done is altruistic on the teachers part, but a lot of it is also survival based on the results we expect from teachers.
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Mike the Mad Biologist has an interesting little piece on public service employees and unions⌠I bet that TX doesnât have laws against police and fire fighter unions.
Why Not Raise the Entry Bar for the Police? | Mike the Mad Biologist
Itâs weird: one group of heavily unionized public workers is under a constant barrage of claims of being underqualified, while another, with much lower educational standards, gets a free pass on those grounds. Iâm referring to teachers and police officers respectively.
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Cognitive skills may fade over time, but research seems to be fairly consistent that poor children who attend preschool have lower incarceration rates, higher rates of employments and better health. So what does the research say about the effectiveness of charter schools?
You know, this is why a discussion about education is so frustrating. Suddenly, according to you, Iâm against parents and apparently even students. If you have cancer, do you go to a doctor or a politician? Assuming you go to a doctor, do you work with him or her to determine a course of treatment? Teachers are professionals. We need to treat them as such.
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Except itâs rarely the âbest possible education.â That pesky research again shows that overall, charter schools are no more effective than public schools.
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safe bet.
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Iâm just looking for more agreement. I love agreement! It has NOTHING to do with my reading comprehension! 
What do you mean by âeffective?â If you mean, âscores higher on tests,â then thatâs one way of measuring what some people want in a school. If everybody was concerned about test scores, then you would have a point. But thatâs the thing about education. Different people are looking for different things from it.
For lots of people, test scores donât matter. There are other things they value much more than test scores. And thereâs absolutely nothing wrong with that. So it really doesnât matter if charters have the same kinds of test results. All that matters is the satisfaction of the families who send their kids to them.
Right, so posting one piece of research of one program is simply not evidence of âfairly consistentâ evidence. For every study that shows a correlation in positive outcomes, thereâs another that doesnât. Look, I wouldnât be surprised to find that it works wonders in some communities and fails in others because of complex dynamics that studies like this simply canât account for. The truest thing we can say is that sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesnât.
Not at all. I have absolutely no idea how you feel about parents and students. Iâm just expressing my opinion that education has to satisfy students and parents first, and everyone else can get in line behind them and then the teachers.
You and I are agreeing 100% on this. (I much prefer this!) Our education system has been almost completely designed by politicians and bureaucrats. That needs to change so that teachers can collaborate with students and parents to create the most satisfying learning experience for each, individual student.
That was the only piece of research that I bothered to link. Head Start and other programs has shown similar outcomes. Welcome to science⌠particular science involving people. Itâs crazy difficult to replicate studies, not to mention finding legitimate control groups. You have to look at the totality of the studies and make your best guess.
Again using the doctor analogy, a physician proscribes a treatment. If it doesnât work, he or she prescribes another. High stakes testing is like telling doctors you will only be paid if they reduce the fever, so a doctor may have little incentive to prescribe anything but tylenol.
And whatâs the alternative? Charter schools? Again, the totality of the evidence shows they are no more effective then public schools. And any benefits they have (student/teacher ratio, active parents, outside funding) are either cost prohibited to implement on a wider basis or do not scale up, so they become walled gardens.
Iâm game for any idea that works-- and so far high quality preschool is the only one that consistently shows to work.
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