Update: Another aspect I hadn’t included—the way that teen pregnancy affects the drop out rate. Considering that abstinence-only is just going to increase the number of teenagers having babies, this is another example of how high drop out rates are a feature, not a bug, of current education “reforms”.
I shouldn’t be surprised to see that this story about the appallingly low graduation rates in the cities of America is being underreported. Reporting this story is facing up to the ugly underbelly of America, and the way that the conservative backlash against the great liberal reforms of the mid-20th century has quietly managed to recreate the America that Republicans dream of, with a huge gap between the rich and everyone else, and a large and growing undereducated underclass. The Women’s Take post optimistically addresses attempts to reduce the dropout rate, but I’m going to point out that the numbers are so high that we have to accept that the high dropout rate in certain cities is a feature, not a bug, of the various educational “reforms” that have been touted over the years.
If you read the report by the EPE Research Center (PDF), you’ll see what I mean. We don’t have kids falling through the cracks. The crack is the point, and the kids who stay on the surface are the minority. Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis all have graduation rates under 35%. That’s not dropout rates—that graduation rates. And there are 17 major U.S. cities that have graduation rates below 50%. But even more sobering, and what shows what’s really going on here, is the comparison of the graduation rates between cities and suburbs.
There are numerous, complex factors that feed these alarming drop-out rates, but we can’t let the deliberate machinations of the system that encourage dropping out for certain students off the hook. Underfunding urban schools is a big part of the problem, of course, the major one. But there’s two big reforms that sound good on paper, but in practice appear to be sculpted with an eye towards encouraging certain populations of students (the working poor, especially racial minorities) to drop out. Standardized testing is one of those mechanisms. “Teaching the test” to improve statistics is mind-numbing regardless of your district, but in places where a lot more students are marginal, it is bound to increase the drop-out rate. Being bored out of your skull and not receiving a real education would make anyone toy with the idea of dropping out, but for kids with a lot more factors in play encouraging dropping out, it’s often going to be more incentive.
Then there’s “zero tolerance”, another idea that sounds good on paper, because it makes a rough sense that teachers shouldn’t spend all their time disciplining a handful of problem kids to the detriment of the learning experience for everyone else. But in reality, it’s going to be selectively enforced, despite the “zero” part of its name. In some parts of the country, selective enforcement of zero tolerance is all but resegregating the schools. We’ve all heard horror stories of kids being expelled or put in in-school suspension for having aspirin on their persons, for talking in class, or other minor infractions. What we don’t hear so much is how the kids who get selected for this kind of zealous disciplinary action are targeted for classist and racist reasons. Civil rights groups like the ACLU, the SPLC, and the NAACP call it the “school to prison pipeline”—the idea being that by hounding certain students with zero tolerance punishments while letting others get off with lighter punishments for the same infractions, you encourage the former group to drop out, which increases the likelihood that they’ll get involved in crime and end up in prison. The ACLU has a fact sheet I highly recommend reading.
This story is not a small one, but a major issue. Dropping out of high school all but condemns someone to a permanent spot in the underclass, and the few people who do manage to escape that fate usually have other privileges to help them out. And considering the relationship between the drop-out rate and the likelihood of going to prison, we must consider the increase of pressure to drop out provided by zero tolerance and “No Child Left Behind” to be a feeder into the prison-industrial complex.
140 Responses to “No child left in school”
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On a recent trip to India, I spent a lot of time talking to people who were convinced that everything in America is 100% super dreamy, and we have none of the problems that they are still battling as a “developing” country.
Every once in a while, I would drop stats like these, and jaws DROPPED. How can it be true that in a rich country like America, only half of students in certain parts of the country ever finish high school.
“How can it be true that in a rich country like America, only half of students in certain parts of the country ever finish high school.”
It’s amazing what we can achieve when we set our (worst, most evil) minds to it while the rest of us pretend it’s not happening…
Now, if there was a serious attempt to limit outrageous CEO compensation (to have more jobs and better education for “the masses”), the crying and whining would be loud enough to hear on the other side of the world…
I would suggest having schools start to keep records of who they’re punishing, how they’re punishing them, what they’re punishing them for, and what race the punished student is. The Army already does this so that it can get a quick idea of if a Commander is treating people differently based on race (both for promotions/awards and for disciplinary actions). While the ACLU fact sheet you cited is interesting, I think there needs to be a lot more statistical work to really nail down that this is a racial issue, as opposed to an issue of urban schools using harsher disciplinary measures than suburban schools.
(Also, could you maybe find an anti-spam measure picture that is a little bit less difficult for a human being to read? Thanks!)
Dropout rates were high before NCLB and the pattern of constant standardized testing came into play.
What’s really the problem is abject destitution in the system: the school system is optimized to teach students who come to school well-fed, after a decent amount of sleep who have quiet personal space in which to do their school work. Solve those problems for the students, and you’re almost all the way there.
Urban schools also tend to “punish” kids who have learning and behavioral pathologies rather than deal with the underlying issues. They also tend to have more kids with these issues, thanks to lack of early intervention and all the splendid consequences of poverty.
What should be a special education problem - where some of the more disruptive kids are either accomodated or put in more appropriate learning environments - becomes a classroom discipline issue that impacts the ability of the entire class to get through the material.
That isn’t just a public school problem, either. The lack of support and the conversion of pathology to misbehavior were common in the Catholic school my husband taught in. That “I don’t want to hear about it because it is the teacher’s problem” mixed with parental denial operates everywhere there is ignorance, apathy, and seriously lacking resources.
There are both good and bad things to be said about standardized testing, but I think the increase in drop outs is definitely a result of schools trying to game the system. Encourage a poor-performing student to drop out, and that’s one fewer low score dragging down the average.
I think an even bigger cause of the high drop out rate is the fact that a high school diploma isn’t really good for anything anymore, besides getting into college. If you’re told you’re not going to college anyway, there is no point in spending one or two more years in a punitive school system. Few jobs list High School Diploma as a requirement.
Its worth noting the metro areas with the smallest gap between urban and suburban rates seem to be consolidated city-counties and therefore more racially integrated. Charlotte even had busing.
You think they’d catch on.
I’m not from the US. Is it true that there are high schools in the US that aren’t even able to give out diplomas because they don’t have accreditation? That students who “graduate” have to go on to Community Colleges just to be considered a high school graduate for purposes of university? Cuz being told that by a friend of mine simply appalled me. What the heck is the point?
I’d also like to add we need to stop pretending like everybody should go to college. Sorry, some people aren’t met for it. Secondary education needs to be separated into college prep and vocational schools so theres more focus on one particular area and therefore more efficient.
Whats more, those that don’t go to college could learn an actual SKILL, making their diploma worth something.
So Ben, you think that where a kid is at at age 14 is where they should be for life?
You think that this can be done without all hispanic women being shoved off into cosmetology programs and all black men into construction labor?
These problems with “tracking” according to racial and ethnic and class lines are very well documented forms of bias.
Explain exactly how such hard divisions will work around these issues - because George Bush should have been pouring concrete, and Mexican American girls who want to be doctors and lawyers are being shoved into hair salon and sewing classes in LA.
It’d be even more interesting if that chart also included the reported drop out rate. My incoming freshman class in a suburban Houston district had ~650 students; my graduating class size was a little over 500, but my school had a really low drop out rate. Where did 150 students go? The district had an alternative high school, one where they actually treated students like people, but I don’t think all 150 ended up there.
It’s one of those facts that people are silent about is that the reason vocational programs have been eliminated is not out of some kind of high-minded egalitarianism, but rather because vocational programs are much more expensive than “book learning.”
Also, Ms Kate, the community college system is more than sufficient to help students who want to get off the vocational track and back into college prep for those for whom that decision at the age of 14 turned out to be a poor fit.
The problem is the issue of widespread destitution, which the schools are not equipped to handle, and the fact that a high school diploma is probably not worth that much more than a GED for someone not going to college.
Kate-
FWIW I went to a Governor’s school (magnet/college prep high school) and it was around 50-60% minority and decidedly working class. I’d like to see more of them.
I wasn’t talking about construction work, either, I meant skilled technical jobs, computer hardware and the like.
I admit I have no idea how to fairly separate the two tracks, but IIRC European countries do something similar to this.
I think another problem with typical high schools is that they are simply prepping you for a life of following instructions. They aren’t teaching you anything usefull unless you go on to university, and then on to a job where the management style is the same as the university’s teaching style.
Kids who don’t have the patience to go to “Careers” class (a mandatory grad. class in some states) for several hours a week when they could be working (at their job) will inevitably leave.
I don’t have a solution, but I think something definatly needs to be done.
And Ben D.
Just for the record alot of construction work is very technical. It drives me nut when people assume anyone can do it. Most contractors apprentice for years to get where they are.
“…because George Bush should have been pouring concrete…”
I have to disagree with you here, Ms Kate. Pouring and working concrete actually take skill and knowledge. I’m not sure GWB has enough of either to make a go of it…
“…and Mexican American girls who want to be doctors and lawyers are being shoved into hair salon and sewing classes in LA.”
Right on. When your horizons are so narrow (that narrowness enforced by society/schools/parents/etc.), all you see are extremely limited possibilities.
Poor kids are just as smart as rich kids - they just have way fewer opportunities to show it and get access to the educational resources they need to become what they could be. That is very wrong…
Thanks Ben. I just wanted to bring up the fact that in the US such systems routinely assign students to tracks according to class, race, ethnicity … not by aptitude, interest, or merit.
These historic problems with “vokes” or vocational schools would have to be addressed.
I do agree that the “everyone must go to college” situation is a bit out of hand. Too many kids going who really don’t belong there, too many kids that do belong there can’t pay. Testing of high schoolers was intended to generate data and approximate the GED system of minimum competency to get a diploma. It was never meant as a college preparatory assessment.
nuts =)
too much caffeine!
Baltimore always breaks my heart. I grew up *just* outside the city line, in a middle/working-class suburb. I definitely knew kids who lived just inside the city line, who went to my public county-run highschool on borrowed addresses(Baltimore City is not a part of more affluent Baltimore County). I even knew of a kid who, eventually and tragically, got found out. His teachers seemed pretty disappointed to see him forced to go, too.
Baltimore City schools were and are a mess. The smart kids with good parents but little funds scratched out entries into parorchial schools in the area.
The city has a lot of potential and a lot of dispair. Kids just don’t see the point on stayin in. What’s scarier, I know people who began teaching in Baltimore only to be worn down so fast by the kids and the system - good people with good intentions, who tell me now “never try to teach here.”
Important note: these figures cited above are the “graduate on time” rates. Many students take extra time due to work loads, family loads, parenting, ESL issues, etc. Just because the schools don’t shove them through in 4 years doesn’t mean they don’t eventually finish.
Kids in our school system sometimes take an extra year because they didn’t encounter English in their daily lives until they were 14 or 15 …
I dunno, Ben. Not everybody has to or wants to go to college, true. But everyone should have the option if they do want to–whether they go at age 18 or whether they go back to school in their twenties or thirties–and that includes having been given the academic training of a good high school. Even if someone decides they don’t want to go to college, or can never afford it, having had a a high school education that’s the same as the people who did go to college makes the rift between college-educated and non-college-educated people a lot smaller.
Like it or not, our society values the piece of paper that says you graduated from high school. If you have that but choose to work in the trades, that’s one thing. If you don’t have that, you pretty much can’t get *out* of low-paying, low-prestige jobs. Why do you think GEDs are so popular in poverty-alleviation programs?
Oh don’t worry, I’m college educated and couldn’t do even the most basic construction work if my entire life depended on it.
Kate-
I think the “everyone must go to college” thing is driven firstly by the student loan industry, and secondloy by even our public state universities turning into combination real estate companies/sports clubs. They sell college as a lifestyle choice now instead of as an education.
I didn’t graduate too long ago and I remember so many people who had no idea what they were doing there, and at the same time lived under crushing debt. One girl ended up dropping out after realizing college wasn’t for her and became a nurses assistant. Even though she had a good salary, she had to declare personal bankruptcy because of the student loans she took out.
I agree that tracking would be a problem, but seriously, not everyone should go to college, and our vocational education system is piss poor. My father is in a trade, and the high school graduates who went through the vocational track in our area (not even a high-stress urban area) don’t even know enough to start entry level without significant additional training. Changing that is not some sort of end-all, be-all solution, but it would make for better job prospects for high school graduates, which would be a good thing and it would help keep/bring back some manufacturing jobs. There already are some industries that have returned their factories to the U.S. because they realized they needed an educated work force more than they needed a cheap one, but the average age of their workers is something like 45.
Also,
In addition to the points Amanda made, I think this is the other key way NCLB really jacks up the drop-out rate. There is an inverse incentive for teachers and administrators built into the system. Bug or feature? You be judge.
Mike - I think GWB would actually have been good at pouring concrete or something physical that demanded careful workmanship. It would have been more appropriate to his skills/abilities/personality for him to have learned a trade, or become an elementary educator than for him to be pushed into business school. He seems best suited for physical work in controlled environments and he relates well to kids and animals (note brush clearing, baseball playing and enduring marriage to children’s librarian).
I don’t think the guy is a total idiot.
The other problem with the “must go to college!” line is that there are increasingly more jobs where a college degree is now required, but where one probably isn’t needed, for example to be a front desk supervisor at a hotel or working at a pre-school.
I have to wonder if people are conflating the possession of a college degree with someone just being a little bit older and more mature (21 instead of 18).
Hmm. *thinks about this* Several people have made some good points between when I posted my comment and when it showed up on the page. I’ll shut up now, especially since I admit I’m coming from the point of view of someone who really likes academics–I know there are people for whom it isn’t as enjoyable, or who see other things as more valuable.
Anna-
Here in the states all public schools are run by the state and give out diplomas. It is also the case that all students are required to be schooled or homeschooled with certain standards (that are very very loose) until they are 14. I would recommend you check out the wikipedia article on education in the united states if you are interested in more information.
Our poor “failing” district has lost money every year because of low test scores - we have a high percentage of SPED students who come from other districts who can afford to kick them out. We’ve replaced the fun electives with compulsory remedial classes so that some kids have two math classes and two language arts classes every day. It’s all part of an effort to boost our test scores. There’s nothing wrong with remedial programs - I wish we had more of them - but when test prep replaces the one class (usually gym or art) that keeps a struggling kid going to school, you have a problem.
Also, I think a stronger emphasis on languages would be helpful.
Languages, technical skills, labor skills, these are the things that will help high school graduates secure a job.
I knew a girl who had just graduated from a prestigious liberal arts university and got a job in administration. She was very frustrated because she had hoped to get a job as a business consultant right away.
She had very few applicable skills for an office setting.
She was smart, and I don’t mean to insult her or her education, but her expectations of a high paying corporate job at 22 were a little inflated.
Yeah. I was just working on writing up job descriptions for some things like that the other week. Some of the jobs technically wouldn’t even need a high school diploma. At least we did have several combinations of training and experience that were acceptable, like either a high school diploma and a couple years’ experience, or a college diploma and one year’s experience. And knowing my employer, she would have hired people she thought could do the job even if they didn’t have all the right degrees.
Sometimes I wonder if having a college degree is a way of ensuring that the “right kind” of people apply for jobs, but that’s not something that’s easy to quantify.
(Disclaimer: I made it into college, but never finished. After a three-year hiatus, I still hold out hope that someday I’ll go back, but I’m less sure than I was.)
Ms. Kate, a properly set-up comprehensive vocational program can benefit children who have interests that do not coincide with college prep. without denying them the possibility of college in the future. Yes, at 14 many students do not have a clue about where they want to be in ten years but they may have already expressed interest in things that give them joy that are not pre-calculus. If nothing in the school curriculum is leading a child to where they see themselves and only to some job that society feels it needs filled, then we are not supporting the child regardless of their background.
The education system has got to be engineered to be in support of the child and not society as an amorphous eater of lives. I keep hearing how society is going to need x thousand of this type worker or that type worker and how the school systems have to create those workers. So how has is the factory/prison model working- creating tons of X-style workers or tons of fed-up with the system drop-outs? I would prefer 50 happy, high-skill Latina hairdressers to 50 depressed high-skill Latina lawyers/doctors/engineers. As long as we are focused on the end result being happy and high-skilled and not ‘fits this particular cubicle’ then we are better off as a society.
So- 1) change the funding mechanisms for schools so that all schools get consistent, predictable resources regardless of test scores or current enrollment levels. The cost of building maintenance does not change significantly if you have 10 students or 100.
2) increased involvement by local groups in creating a sense of community and to find where social networks need to be reinforced. This can also be used to show children a wider range of life options than they were aware of and create networking oppurtunities for familes and older children.
By the way, this is a fantastic and important topic, thank you!
My high school (LI, NY) used to award two types of diploma — the local diploma and the regents diploma. For the regents diploma, you needed to pass the state tests and all that, but for the local one, you only needed to pass your classes and a maybe a couple of the state tests. I thought this was a good idea, and would address some of the problems mentioned above, but sometime during my high school years (1998-2002), it was phased out. Now they only award the regents diplomas.
Anyone have thoughts on a system like this?
Hey, the “Nashville/Davidson County” (bottom of the list, my old stomping grounds) difference isn’t all that bad, comparatively speaking. Being a product of Nashville public schools that is surprising. I wasn’t in an “Urban” district. I went to the smallest high school in the county. Way out is the sticks. We had the largest FFA chapter and a ton of dropouts.
“I would prefer 50 happy, high-skill Latina hairdressers to 50 depressed high-skill Latina lawyers/doctors/engineers.”
Maybe we should, I don’t know, ASK those Latinas what they would like, and offer them the same choices/opportunities anybody else has (or should have)…
Priorites make a big difference too.
Example:
A kid from a low income family knows that his parents are counting of his or her paycheck from the after school job to pay rent. Their boss offers a few more hours in the afternoon, but that would mean cutting some classes. If rent is not paid the family will be evicted. If class is skipped nothing will happen. They will still have their job, their house, and everything they have learned this far in life.
In the short term it makes sense for them to prioritize work over school.
For someone in their teen years it could be difficult to put education first, even though in the long run it would be beneficial.
I’d like to add that, even for the college-prep students, having some practical skills when leaving high school — like actually knowing how to use all the programs in Microsoft Office, or book keeping software — would be a good idea. Lots of (self included here) college grads, as well as high school grads, would find it a lot easier to get entry level jobs if we graduated with the ability to do the things our prospective employers want us to be able to do. But, in there among AP English and calculus and what have you, there’s precious little time to take classes like that. That, or the classes simply aren’t offered.
I don’t think many people believe that opposition to integration (and busing in particular) is due to its not working.
This has been known for decades: desegregation really does fix inequality, in education, housing, employment, law enforcement, and pretty much anywhere else. Anyone who resists desegregation can therefore be assumed to have something other than equality as a goal.
As Amanda says, persisting inequality is a feature, not a bug. Don’t let them piss down your back and tell you it’s raining.
Really horrified.
rowmyboat - My home state also had ‘regents’ diplomas vs. ‘regular’ diplomas when I graduated.
It sounds like a cute system, but to be perfectly honest I don’t think it really means anything in the real world. I was accepted to college before graduation, and as far as I know none of my schools specified a ‘regents’ diploma over an ordinary one as an admissions criterion.
The only difference I ever saw was that the two different diplomas enabled some of my classmates to graduate a year early by rushing to satisfy the fewer requirements of the ordinary diploma (and still going to college just like everybody else).
would prefer 50 happy, high-skill Latina hairdressers to 50 depressed high-skill Latina lawyers/doctors/engineers. As long as we are focused on the end result being happy and high-skilled and not ‘fits this particular cubicle’ then we are better off as a society.
Mike- the second sentence addresses that- the point is to ensure that students coming out of the school system, regardless the level of attainment, are happy and high skilled. The focus has to be on the individual child and not some perceived societal advantage or disadvantage concerning what each child attains based on their perceived needs. A child who comes out of the system with a good basic education and a set of skills that allows them to pay the bills is more likely to reenter the education system to retrain in their own field or to try to cross over to another. Someone who is happy in their chosen career is more likely to strive for success than someone who is just treading water to pay the bills.
A vocation can be as highly rewarding as a profession and as challenging but the current system is gearing everyone towards college or out of school without offering the larger range of options available.
I have to wonder if people are conflating the possession of a college degree with someone just being a little bit older and more mature (21 instead of 18).
judging by my experience applying for jobs in my mid-twenties, without a college degree:
i think it more likely that employers are after degree-holders because they want employees who are literate. highschool kids get tested endlessly, but all that test prep comes at the expense of doing actual reading and writing. it’s difficult to test reading comprehension, so it’s not really something schools emphasise, and so you get kids graduating from highschool who can’t manage fairly simple tasks. the assumption seems to be that if you’ve got a college degree, you’ve shown yourself able to can make your way through a curriculum that isn’t strictly multiple-choice, making you better prepared for functioning in the work environment.
of course, that’s what highschool used to be for, but HS degrees/GEDs are essentially meaningless, now. degree inflations sucks. hard.
All of these ideas are great, and workable, but if wages don’t start climbing to a rate comparable with the rising cost of living, it won’t matter. People who work in “skilled” jobs can barely make ends meet right now, hell, people who work in jobs requiring degrees can barely make ends meet right now.
a college degree is now required, but where one probably isn’t needed, for example to be a front desk supervisor at a hotel or working at a pre-school.
I agree with you on the front desk clerk (and no hotel in my area requires a degree for that) and I see where you are coming from, but pre-school teachers…they need special training. Pre-schools are not daycare; they have to meet certain standards and criteria to call themselves pre-schools. They don’t just watch kids, they teach them and prepare them for kindergarten/elementary school. Early childhood education should definitely require some sort of specific schooling.
This doesn’t surprise me.
Between hostile environment and apathetic kids, you get sky-high drop-outs.
Yes, some of it goes on the kids too. The ones who sit in the back of class and masturbate. The ones who turn in blank tests with no names. The ones who throw home-made bombs and start rumbles on the grounds.
My husband’s seen all of those in his little rural district.
Something no teacher will tell you: By fifth grade they have a really good idea who is going on to college and who will end up in prison, even in an all-white or all-minority school.
Vocational training would save a lot of kids from jail. It’d save a lot of them from student loans and bankruptcy. But it won’t happen, despite a growing shortage of drivers, nurses, plumbers and other blue-collar workers.
I’m wrangling with my district right now. I have a very bright, very lazy son. We can make him do his homework. We cannot make him stay awake in class long enough to turn it in. (he goes to bed at 9 with his sibs) Grade 8 is high-stakes testing. They want to make sure he doesn’t come back and foul up their scores.
I want him to be good for more than driving a truck like me, although he is in love with the rigs. I don’t think trucking’s going to be a viable profession for too much longer.
it’s difficult to test reading comprehension, so it’s not really something schools emphasise
I might be nitpicking, here, but I remember having a reading comprehension section on every standardized test I ever took, from elementary school up to the exam my university administered to anyone who wanted to stick around past sophomore year.
Many jobs call for a college education because that implies improved language comprehension skills but also a degree of computer literacy. Many jobs that call for a college degree can be filled by people with good literacy skills and a few classes in job specific computer classes. To a certain extent businesses need to communicate with their education departments about their needs so that deficiencies in training programs can be addressed, this is part of structuring vocational studies to current standards. It can be expensive to do but if a student has a high percentage chance of getting a job locally by finishing a program then it is a good investment of time for school districts, communities, businesses and students.
I think the U.S. needs a good vocational education system, one that doesn’t have class-based stigma attached to it, that actually requires students to learn something in their pre-vocational schools, and that will teach them broadly applicable skills during. Channelling students based on class/race is a problem to watch out for, but it’s not insurmountable.
I think 16 is a good age for this kind of decision. Teenagers know themselves well enough by that point. I agree that European countries force a decision too early.
I agree with you on the front desk clerk (and no hotel in my area requires a degree for that)
heh. they do in baltimore, funnily enough.
the opoponax: there are such sections on tests, frequently, but they’re hard to implement well, and it’s difficult and expensive to actually evaluate them. the best they can usually manage is a set of questions checking for basic comprehension, with maybe a short-form response. actual evaluation of a decent writing sample isn’t so common, i don’t think. the most we ever had to write was a paragraph or two. the revised SATs fall down here: there are plenty of kids in classes with me now who got good scores on their writing sections but struggle to string coherent sentences together.
I think the U.S. needs a good vocational education system, one that doesn’t have class-based stigma attached to it, that actually requires students to learn something in their pre-vocational schools, and that will teach them broadly applicable skills during. Channelling students based on class/race is a problem to watch out for, but it’s not insurmountable.
I think 16 is a good age for this kind of decision. Teenagers know themselves well enough by that point. I agree that European countries force a decision too early.
I think the U.S. needs a good vocational education system, one that doesn’t have class-based stigma attached to it, that actually requires students to learn something in their pre-vocational schools, and that will teach them broadly applicable skills during. Channelling students based on class/race is a problem to watch out for, but it’s not insurmountable.
I think 16 is a good age for this kind of decision. Teenagers know themselves well enough by that point. I agree that European countries force a decision too early.
OK, now I understand what causes double/triple posts.
A kid from a low income family knows that his parents are counting of his or her paycheck from the after school job to pay rent. Their boss offers a few more hours in the afternoon, but that would mean cutting some classes. If rent is not paid the family will be evicted. If class is skipped nothing will happen.
I’ve had a lot of students drop out right after Grade 8. Hey, they’re big enough to pass for 16 and school is just a hassle, usually because of language or SPED issues. The parents tell the district that they’re transferring out, and then just don’t bother to enroll in a new district. The kids fall through the cracks, especially in a big city.
Sometimes the parents want to continue in school but the lure of minimum wage is just too much for a kid with a horizon four inches wide to resist.
Every kid who drops out breaks my heart, but it’s not an entirely irrational choice, I’m afraid. Poor kids, especially undocumented ones, already know they don’t have a lot of choices in life and they just want to make the best of things. Why not start a family early? Why not get a job and help with rent?
I mainly think that the local vs. regents diploma is useful because it enables kids to graduated high school, but they don’t have to pass oodles of state tests. And particularly if you are not headed for college, that’s an advantage.
actual evaluation of a decent writing sample isn’t so common, i don’t think.
Reading comprehension and writing ability are two completely different things. You’re right that it’s rare to see writing evaluation on a standardized test, and probably difficult to analyze the resulting data meaningfully.
I’ll also add that I don’t think the problem is people who can’t read, but people who can’t write. I worked a lot of crappy administrative jobs, with a lot of my fellow clerical drones. Not many of my coworkers ever seemed to have problems with the kinds of reading comprehension we needed to do the work (filing, data entry, processing paperwork, and the like), and in fact many of my coworkers over the years seemed to read quite a bit for pleasure. But anytime someone needed to draft a memo, disaster would generally ensue.
Shelby, I agree–a better example would have been childcare workers.
degree inflations sucks. hard.
Yeah, in my case that’s looking like a PhD. Ugh.
outlier
April 7, 2008 at 12:52 pm
OK, now I understand what causes double/triple posts.
Experience is still the most reliable teacher, slow but reliable
Commenting w/o reading other comments and fast ‘cause my lunch break is ending:
I hope we can somewhat make up for the total (and deliberate) failure of primary education by providing liberal access to good community colleges. Some of the best education I’ve ever had was at Pasadena City College; I got quite passionate about the potential of good CCs (which include the entire adult population in their potential student body, not jsut recent HS grads) as cornerstones of modern democracy.
But they can also be a grind just like K-12 education; depends on the degree of public support and its quality.
Another aspect I hadn’t included—the way that teen pregnancy affects the drop out rate.
It also affects the statistics you put in the initial post in ways that look worse than they are. If you look at how they compute these rates, they are assuming that all high school students either complete in 4 years or drop out.
There are other pathways to a diploma that this analysis doesn’t fully capture. Some students transfer to alternative schools or to private schools, some finish through community college programs (like my nephew), and new parents might take an extra year to complete. In each case, these are students who finish high school, but don’t finish in the traditional pattern and are lost to followup. The alternative track situation is an important bias source in this report, as districts that are actually providing services to populations with difficult circumstances may wind up with deceptively low “official” graduation rates by this calculus.
Except, of course, that this is bullshit and has been for a while. Washington DC has one of the highest per-pupil expenditures in the country and some of the lowest performing students.
Kansas City, Missouri, is one of the worst districts in the country and spends more per pupil than the surrounding suburban districts, which are some of the highest performing.
The problem is that you don’t want to discuss what really makes schools underperform and kids drop out: the kids don’t really care, the parents don’t really care, after a while the teachers stop caring, and the school board has a different agenda.
Part of fixing a problem is admitting what is causing it in the first place.
Did I hear a troll grunt?
Or was that a cow fart.
It’s called introducing facts to a discussion. You should really try it sometime.
“Except, of course, that this is bullshit and has been for a while.”
…and I call bullshit on your proclamation of bullshit.
While it is true that in any individual school or school system, adding more money will not necessarily guarantee improved results, I would bet that statistically, overall better funded schools/systems perform better on average.
It has always amazed me that when it come to weapons systems for the military, CEO compensation, Oil Company revenues, and a host of other activities, more money is almost always considered better.
But when the costs of schooling our kids, more money (for many liberatarian/conservative types) is never the answer. They think teachers should teach for free, and schools should cost nothing. “God forbid MY taxes go to pay for educating those people’s kids.”
I realize that having a well-educated populace is counter to the wingnut/corporatocracy’s efforts to turn America into a recreation of Dickens England, but come on!…
Oh, a troll fart. That was it.
It isn’t as bad as it looks– as has been brought up, this ignores people who graduate a year late, who get a GED– or even graduate a year early. But even thinking of that, it does mean the system is not really flexible enough.
the kids don’t really care, the parents don’t really care
It’s hard to care about school when you barely have a roof over your head, don’t get enough to eat, have nobody there after school to make sure homework gets done, live in a neighborhood so dangerous you can’t go outside to play, nonstop family drama and an unstable living situation, no adult example to follow in terms of why you should even bother, and/or get mocked by other kids in the neighborhood for “acting white” if you get too interested in academic pursuits.
It’s hard to care about your kids’ education when you can barely make ends meet, may be in an abusive relationship, are constantly under the thumb of the welfare system, work for minimum wage in a service job where everyone treats you like shit, don’t have a stable living situation, and don’t have any reason to think that education will even do anything for your kid.
In terms of race, I discovered something relatively minor in a book by Angela Davis (I think it was her memoirs? Some of this could also have come from The Autobiography of Malcolm X) - during the Jim Crow era, it did not matter how educated you happened to be. Black people were not hired for anything but the most menial and undesirable jobs. You could have a masters degree, but you were still going to make a living cleaning toilets or working in the fields. Getting educated, therefore, was a waste of money that did not guarantee jack shit. So it’s pretty easy to see why academics aren’t emphasized in the black community 40-50 years later (especially considering how many black people are raised in part by their grandparents and older relatives).
“Did I hear a troll grunt?
Or was that a cow fart.
Oh, a troll fart. That was it.”
It WAS a lot like a farty sound, but I still feel seroj needs to be confronted…
I discovered something relatively minor
Sorry, should have been ‘discovered something relatively minor that made a huge impact on my understanding of all this’. But ya’ll probably got the idea.
Since we’re doing barefoot epidemiology here, I have more evidence that this isn’t just a US problem; it’s a right-wing problem in general. The neocon former Premier of Ontario instituted a whole bunch of education “reforms” allegedly aimed at making Ontario’s schools better, like high-stakes standardised testing and early tracking of students based on a number of factors (including their self-reported preferences). Empirically, the dropout rate went way up, largely from kids panicking about being able to pass the standardised “exit exam.” Because of the way the courses are tracked, kids also have to choose by the time they’re 14 or 15 whether they’d like to go to college or university (I myself didn’t figure that one out until I was 18!).
I know a young woman who’s now an extremely highly paid legal assistant with a prestigious law firm in town (has her own office with her name on the door and a huge salary at age 22 or so). She’s kicking herself now that she didn’t choose back then to take the university-track courses so that she could have gone to law school and become a lawyer. She may very well do that eventually, but because of the way the postsecondary system is in Ontario, she’ll have to wait until she’s 25 to do it. She grew up in a very working-class household and, despite everyone’s best efforts, at age 15, couldn’t see beyond a pretty limited horizon. I don’t blame her for that at all, but she is a case study for people who think that 14, 15, and 16 year olds really know what they want to do with the rest of their lives.
Did I mention also that another component of the “reforms” was mandatory teacher testing, with the tests developed and administered by ETS, the American company that produces the GRE and LSAT? (At least American right-wingers funnel money to companies in their own country; ours always get that part wrong.) Turns out they had too many people booked to take the test in Toronto than they could handle, so ETS in their infinite wisdom, decided to arbitrarily move the overflow to a new testing location…
…nine hours’ drive away in North Bay. When called on it, they protested and squealed (ETS can’t afford a friggin’ map?!) and finally made other arrangements. I think that was after someone pointed out that it would have been less time-consuming for the Toronto test-takers to go to the ETS head office to complete their testing. Why Canadians even use the ETS tests for anything is, frankly, beyond me, since they’re obviously incompetent and their tests are exceedingly culturally biased against non-Americans (as anyone who’s sat the LSAT or GRE will tell you).
So there’s more going on here than just that; the whole system is pretty much utterly dysfunctional.
Somehow, “resource allocation disparities between districts within MSAs” is a little too complex a “fact” for his oversimplified world. Troll fart he seems to understand.
ah yes. thank you for introducing the “fact” that the students, parents and teachers all don’t care, which is totally something we can objectively evaluate.
seroj, did you read the whole thread? there was some discussion about the sort of environment that allows kids to learn: some degree of financial security, a tolerable home situation, and support for those who have health problems, including emotional disorders or learning disabilities. and guess what? suburban kids have more of that, on average, than kids in the city, because their families are, on average, better off. the higher spending is an attempt to help kids with fewer family resources to just catch up.
“In terms of race, I discovered something relatively minor in a book by Angela Davis (I think it was her memoirs? Some of this could also have come from The Autobiography of Malcolm X) - during the Jim Crow era, it did not matter how educated you happened to be. Black people were not hired for anything but the most menial and undesirable jobs. You could have a masters degree, but you were still going to make a living cleaning toilets or working in the fields. Getting educated, therefore, was a waste of money that did not guarantee jack shit. So it’s pretty easy to see why academics aren’t emphasized in the black community 40-50 years later (especially considering how many black people are raised in part by their grandparents and older relatives). ”
Isn’t it true that a black person is still more likely to make it with a quality professional sports contract than make it as a law partner or Fortune 500 CEO? I remember that discussed in a discussion on teenage motherhood here a few months ago.
Of course, no way could racism POSSIBLY have anything to do with it, and if it does, it’s solely liberal racism from affirmative action, PCness, and Robert Byrd being in the KKK 60 years ago. /s
This is a complex problem with no easy solution. I teach High School in a blue collar suburban district. Our Freshman class is always 1-200 bigger than the senior class. We have a very low “official” drop-out rate. Some kids just don’t care and don’t want to be in school and their parents don’t care either. Teen pregancy and drugs are a big problem with this crowd. Many just give up, they failed the TAKS test in Jr. High and early high school and since they can’t graduate if they don’t pass, they give up. Many Immigrants also can’t learn enough in a few years to pass either school or the TAKS test. I don’t care what trolls say, but more money would help. More electives and less mandatory classes would help. On any given day I can focus 90% of my effort on helping 2-3 troubled kids and ignore everyone else or teach everyone and allow some of the kids to disapear. We do the best we can.
This is a complex problem with no easy solution. I teach High School in a blue collar suburban district. Our Freshman class is always 1-200 bigger than the senior class. We have a very low “official” drop-out rate. Some kids just don’t care and don’t want to be in school and their parents don’t care either. Teen pregancy and drugs are a big problem with this crowd. Many just give up, they failed the TAKS test in Jr. High and early high school and since they can’t graduate if they don’t pass, they give up. Many Immigrants also can’t learn enough in a few years to pass either school or the TAKS test. I don’t care what trolls say, but more money would help. More electives and less mandatory classes would help. On any given day I can focus 90% of my effort on helping 2-3 troubled kids and ignore everyone else or teach everyone and allow some of the kids to disapear. We do the best we can.
This is a complex problem with no easy solution. I teach High School in a blue collar suburban district. Our Freshman class is always 1-200 bigger than the senior class. We have a very low “official” drop-out rate. Some kids just don’t care and don’t want to be in school and their parents don’t care either. Teen pregancy and drugs are a big problem with this crowd. Many just give up, they failed the TAKS test in Jr. High and early high school and since they can’t graduate if they don’t pass, they give up. Many Immigrants also can’t learn enough in a few years to pass either school or the TAKS test. I don’t care what trolls say, but more money would help. More electives and less mandatory classes would help. On any given day I can focus 90% of my effort on helping 2-3 troubled kids and ignore everyone else or teach everyone and allow some of the kids to disapear. We do the best we can.
This is a complex problem with no easy solution. I teach High School in a blue collar suburban district. Our Freshman class is always 1-200 bigger than the senior class. We have a very low “official” drop-out rate. Some kids just don’t care and don’t want to be in school and their parents don’t care either. Teen pregancy and drugs are a big problem with this crowd. Many just give up, they failed the TAKS test in Jr. High and early high school and since they can’t graduate if they don’t pass, they give up. Many Immigrants also can’t learn enough in a few years to pass either school or the TAKS test. I don’t care what trolls say, but more money would help. More electives and less mandatory classes would help. On any given day I can focus 90% of my effort on helping 2-3 troubled kids and ignore everyone else or teach everyone and allow some of the kids to disapear. We do the best we can.
This is a complex problem with no easy solution. I teach High School in a blue collar suburban district. Our Freshman class is always 1-200 bigger than the senior class. We have a very low “official” drop-out rate. Some kids just don’t care and don’t want to be in school and their parents don’t care either. Teen pregancy and drugs are a big problem with this crowd. Many just give up, they failed the TAKS test in Jr. High and early high school and since they can’t graduate if they don’t pass, they give up. Many Immigrants also can’t learn enough in a few years to pass either school or the TAKS test. I don’t care what trolls say, but more money would help. More electives and less mandatory classes would help. On any given day I can focus 90% of my effort on helping 2-3 troubled kids and ignore everyone else or teach everyone and allow some of the kids to disapear. We do the best we can.
RE: persisting inequality is a feature not a bug:
The first attempt to change this, to move to a more Charlotte- like system would be met with high-pitched squeals of “oh god, you’re going to drag us down to their level”.
Interrobang, NO ONE knows with complete certainty what they want to do with the rest of their lives, but everyone eventually needs to make those decisions.
The real difference is, do we make them earlier, saving ourselves several years of sitting through classes that have no use or relevance (and if you’re not college bound anyway, those are the classes they put you in), or do we risk possibly changing our minds later but gaining training and useful skills in the meantime, and getting out earlier with a real ability to make a living?
Take the woman in your example. She couldn’t see herself in law school at 15…would she have at 18? I think they odds fall on no. If she were in the U.S., there’s a good chance she would have wasted two years in high school and gotten a legal secretary degree anyway. The difference is, now she can use her income to put herself through college. It’s harsh that she has to wait a few years to get in (while taking courses, I assume), but that’s an argument for making crossover paths easier, not against vocational schools in general.
interrobang, so is it your contention that right-wing educational ideology is consistently counter-productive?
What are the earmarks of this ideology? Is there an over-arching theme or philosophy that unites its various tactics?
If college were fully-paid and based on merit, I think there would be a lot more equity and interest in education in the US. We have to consider how much less possible a college education has become to most graduates in the past decade, and how that alone can affect completion rates.
For those saying these statistics don’t reflect those who graduate a year late … how many kids really stick it out after failing a year or two in high school? I would suspect the social stigma would be a lot bigger at that point, and I am related to several people who have GEDs precisely because they were going to fail their senior year, couldn’t take the humiliation, dropped out and later made it up. And I think it’s appropriate not to count the people who later get GEDs as being graduates of a given school system, because they aren’t - the system failed them or they just didn’t care or whatever - but they didn’t graduate from their high schools.
As for students with limited English, I also wonder if a statistically significant number of them stay in school an extra year or two. I’m not trying to be antagonistic - I’m honestly curious. I know when I taught ESL to adults and our program was funded through the local City College system, we would end up faking the birth dates of half the students. They were under 18, recent arrivals, had been out of school for years in their countries of origin and came here to work and send money home, not to go to high school. But if we filled out their actual birth dates, they would be disqualified from the program - anyone under 18 was supposed to be in high school! So personal experience is that people who have no exposure to English before the age of 14 or 15 are likely to not even be in the school system to show up statistically, but I recognize I could be wrong here.
I guess the reason I’m arguing all this is that I hope - for those questioning the accuracy of the stats - that you aren’t try to say there isn’t a problem here.
kidlacan,
I don’t disagree with much of what you say. I was challenging Amanda’s counterfactual assertion that the main reason urban districts do poorly is for lack of funding. You seem to agree considering your last sentence.
Thanks to Dumb and Dumber for going on about troll farts and ignoring pretty clear factual inaccuracies. I sure feel “confronted.”
She couldn’t see herself in law school at 15…would she have at 18? I think they odds fall on no.
However, had she stayed in a high school with a college prep curriculum, she could have decided to go on to college at 18. Then she would be well positioned for law school later if it interested her. I’m in my mid 20’s, and most of my friends are just now figuring out whether they want to pursue grad school or not, and in what field. If none of us had bachelor’s degrees, none of us would even get to make that choice.
Yes, DC spends a great deal per student. On the other hand, DC has no state funding, and no state education infrastructure. DC, therefor, is a unique example in the nation, and not a good basis for comparison.
(See: US Census Press Release for a short overview)
Likewise, Kansas City is an exception, in that there was a court order requiring the district to spend money to bring grossly sub-par facilities up.
While in these two most unusual cases spending has not immediately resulted in high grades, there is a very high correlation between district spending per pupil and test scores or graduation rates.
Hmm. Seroj seems to be so concerned about the facts, he didn’t notice that both DC and Kansas City do relatively well with their dropout rates. Not that we should be happy with 64 or 68%, but a lot of folks do worse.
Also, I know the DC school system has to spend a lot for non-education social services– subsidized lunch, counseling, whatever, and this goes on the budget as school expenditures. So DC isn’t really spending as much on education as it looks like. I don’t know about other cities, but I suspect the same thing applies.
Kaethe,
The DC example is for spending per pupil. It doesn’t matter where the money is coming form. For each kid that walks through the door they get more money than just about anybody else. They still fail just about more than anybody else.
The KCMO school desegregation case is over, but KCMO still spends more money than the surrounding suburban districts.
The failures of the KCMO district and the desegregation order makes very painful reading.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
“I was challenging Amanda’s counterfactual assertion that the main reason urban districts do poorly is for lack of funding. You seem to agree considering your last sentence.”
Lets go back to the tape, shall we?
kidlacan said: “seroj, did you read the whole thread? there was some discussion about the sort of environment that allows kids to learn: some degree of financial security, a tolerable home situation, and support for those who have health problems, including emotional disorders or learning disabilities. and guess what? suburban kids have more of that, on average, than kids in the city, because their families are, on average, better off. the higher spending is an attempt to help kids with fewer family resources to just catch up.
kidlacan distilled:
Suburban kids typically have lots of support resources. This helps them do better.
City kids often do not have as much support. Money can help ameliorate these differences.
Reading comprehension problems, seroj? Did you go to one of those underfunded inner-city schools? Or are you just functioning at the limit of your capacity?…
I’m a big believer in the idea of offering kids a real shot at social mobility, and I believe an investment in resources to that end is justifiable and ultimately economically sound in that it will decrease prison costs and welfare costs and expand the tax bases.
Part of the reason so many teenagers turn to crime or engage in careless and detrimental reproductive activity is because they believe they have nothing to lose. If we could develop strong vocational programs that could prepare these kids for, and place them in decent jobs, we’d probably send fewer of them to prison.
The fiction that all of these kids can go to college is also detrimental to the students for whom that’s actually an option. We’ve already acknowledged that students are dealing with drug problems, difficult family situations, behavioral and psychological problems, etc.
Simply put, college-track students from a wealthier background and the teachers who educate them don’t have to deal with these kinds of problems, and there is no way to keep the brighter kids in failing schools on pace with their richer (white) contemporaries while dealing with these kinds of disruptions in the classroom. The slowest kids set the pace, and NCLB exacerbates that problem by funneling resources to the worst students by measuring teachers based on their ability to get their slowest students over the passing mark.
Bright kids in poor schools need to be identified and tracked into programs designed to keep them on pace with wealthier students before social factors have a chance to drag them down, and additional resources should be deployed to support these students. You can get a lot of education for the cost of incarcerating one prisoner or providing food and medical care to the child of a teenage mother, so cash sunk into building educational programs defrays other social costs of poor education.
Mike, just stop. You are not good at this, despite all the practice.
Amanda asserted that lack of school funding causes poor school performance. This is false.
kidlacan asserted urban children are often poorer than suburban kids and that is why the schools perform poorly. This is arguable, but it’s also probably true.
Amanda: lack of school funding.
kidlacan: children with poor parents.
***
The Dumb and Dumber comments were more effective. With them you seemed childish; when you try to argue you seem stupid.
However, had she stayed in a high school with a college prep curriculum, she could have decided to go on to college at 18. Then she would be well positioned for law school later if it interested her.
Sure, IF she had that sort of curriculum and done well enough, she COULD HAVE gone on to college. Hindsight is always 20/20.
But that’s a whole thread of events that likely wouldn’t have happened, based on the description of this woman at 15. If she didn’t have the choice of a vocational and couldn’t see herself going to college, she probably would have taken non-college-track classes . Then maybe enrolled in a legal secretary program. Or, maybe she wouldn’t have had the patience to stick out high school at all, and could have dropped out.
She’s kicking herself now because she sees and knows a whole bunch more things she didn’t at 15. I think it’s asking a lot to make students put off the possibility of a vocational education just because you think they’ll make a “better” decision if they take the same high school classes for just a few more years.
I don’t think everybody needs to go to college to earn a middle-class living. We’re experiencing a whole lot of degree inflation right now. I think voc-school certifications that actually mean something would help that.
{lights special Airwick for Troll Farts candle with Complex World Scent}
“Amanda asserted that lack of school funding causes poor school performance. This is false.”
…and your response was to talk about expenditure figures per pupil from one school district. One. In the whole nation. And you think that disproves Amanda’s point?
Second, kidlacan is simply stating the obvious: kids living in shittly environments, with few to now support systems in place (which includes, but is not limited to, parents, nutrition, learning diasabilities, language difficulties, etc.) may need more help. Help costs money. Ergo, more money.
I realized that you believe you live in some sort of Randian ideal world where you can just kiss of massive numbers off your fellow citizens with no long term effect. However, when their lack of education, jobs, and other social support leads them to rob your home, steal your car, make and sell meth, join gangs, etc., I suspect you see another side of this situation.
The real world has a way of intruding into your fantasies, no matter how hard you wish it would go away…
“{lights special Airwick for Troll Farts candle with Complex World Scent}”
seroj: “It burns us! IT BURNS US! The nasty clean smell burns us! Take it away!!!”…
Hawise wrote @#31:
Ms. Kate, a properly set-up comprehensive vocational program can benefit children who have interests that do not coincide with college prep. without denying them the possibility of college in the future. Yes, at 14 many students do not have a clue about where they want to be in ten years but they may have already expressed interest in things that give them joy that are not pre-calculus. If nothing in the school curriculum is leading a child to where they see themselves and only to some job that society feels it needs filled, then we are not supporting the child regardless of their background.
YES, YES, YES.
I got shoved into college because that’s what I was “supposed to” do. I didn’t really want to do that. I wanted to play with computers. Not program, mind, but stick the dumb things together and make them work, dig around in data and find answers, help people make their technology work for them.
Instead, I spent three years in college learning to do a job I didn’t want. Thankfully, technology is forgiving to the self-taught, and I’m now self employed, doing what I want to do.
My 16 year-old recently came to me and asked if I’d be pissed if he didn’t go to college. He’s bombarded daily with the message that you MUST go to University, or you’re an idiot. I asked what he intended to do.
“I want to take our vocational Culinary Arts program at school, then go to cooking school.”
To which I say “Get on with your bad self!” He’s got a passionate interest and a natural talent in the kitchen. I’m behind him all the way. He’s not shooting himself in the foot by going voc, because his school’s program still insists on all of the college requirements in addition to the voc.
I actually mentioned two districts. Amanda mentioned zero.
Two for me, zero for you. Deal with it.
Or, what the hell, do some research and find some counterexamples if you can.
just because you think they’ll make a “better” decision if they take the same high school classes for just a few more years.
It’s not that I think she would have made a different decision, but that she would have been equipped to.
It’s kind of like the reason why you shouldn’t give your 5 year old anything they want for dinner — because they will pick ice cream, and if you let a 5 year old have ice cream for dinner every night it will lead to health problems later. Whereas if you teach your 5 year old how to eat right, she will be able to choose what to have for dinner at 20.
If all students are given access to the same basic high school education, they will be armed with a basic level of skills by the time they are actually old enough to make a decision about where they are going.
I don’t know. I guess I’ve just seen too many 15 and 16 year olds allowed to make their own way in the education system, only to severely limit their options later. One of my brothers wanted to be a software engineer (something that was perfectly within his abilities). But then he got a job “building” sandwiches at Subway summer after sophomore year of high school, and by the time school started up again he was dropping classes left and right so he could prioritize a promotion to assistant manager. 10 years later he’s still an assistant manager in a fast food restaurant, even though he has all the potential in the world — he was just allowed to make a very stupid choice that cannot be taken back now that he knows making $7.50 an hour is a limitation, not a golden opportunity.
To be fair to seroj (although, since I’ve seen him on other threads, and I know what I’m going to regret this), it isn’t “just throwing money at the problem”, it’s actually investing the money into something relevant. You don’t really need a brand new, professional-level football field in a school in Texas when you need a set of textbooks in biology (sorry Amanda, but football worship in Texas is in fact insane). So, “more money” is only half the answer- you need to invest more money in the school.
Amanda asserted that lack of school funding causes poor school performance. This is false.
She did? The post is about the drop out rate in particular, not “poor performance” in general. And she actually says something like:
There are numerous, complex factors that feed these alarming drop-out rates, but we can’t let the deliberate machinations of the system that encourage dropping out for certain students off the hook.
She then goes on to cite three different causes of high drop out rates that she considers to be “deliberate machinations”:
— underfunding urban schools (which she says is “the major one” of this subset)
— Teaching to the tests
— zero tolerance policies and selective enforcement of them
She doesn’t actually say “poor school performance is always caused by poor funding”. (If she had said that, then your stats from DC would be a strong counter argument.)
What she says is “Of the numerous causes of poor performance in schools, I think those three are built into the system on purpose.” She states these are not the only causes. She does not state that these are the most important causes of poor performance. She states only that these three factors are deliberately designed to reduce the performance of urban schools.
Do you have any stats to refute the actual argument Amanda is making? (You know, for “practice”?)
If all students are given access to the same basic high school education, they will be armed with a basic level of skills by the time they are actually old enough to make a decision about where they are going.
This is the point on which we disagree. I don’t think 18 is “old enough” when 16 isn’t. I just don’t see a high school education working that way — changing the way a 16-yo sees her life choices by the time she’s 18. As it is, a basic high school education doesn’t provide skills to those students who aren’t pretty much set on going to college anyway. It doesn’t show students the light, or set them strait if they’re on the wrong path. (A basic high school education is actively harmful to bright students, too.)
Even in a hypothetical universe where this was a *quality* basic high school education we were talking about, I don’t think that would happen.
And…Why are we so averse to taking a page from the book of other countries that successfully educate their citizens. European countries send thier students to vocational schools earlier than 16. They can even drop out after completing 8th grade in some places. Why do Americans insist that one-size-fits-all is going to work?
Dorothy,
I’ll use the same quote of Amanda’s that I led off with:
“Underfunding urban schools is a big part of the problem, of course, the major one.”
Or, if we don’t bury the lede: The major problem with urban schools is that they are underfunded.
I pointed out two examples where urban schools had more funding than their suburban counterparts, despite very different educational outcomes. So, this points out two flaws with Amanda’s argument:
1. Urban schools often receive MORE funding than suburban schools.
2. Urban schools with MORE funding perform more POORLY than suburban schools.
If we were to be logical about these two data points, we would conclude that more funding leads to poorer performance. Now, this isn’t true, but it’s also not true that Urban schools are poorly funding vis a vis suburban schools or that poor funding is why the kids don’t graduate.
Seroj, I’ll take your “two outlier examples” and see you one nested, multi-level, random effects model relating funding and performance, corrected for spatial autocorrelation.
Nice that you live in such a simplistic world that cato institute annoyance and outlier examples that aren’t even compared to anything internally or externally can stand in for reality. Those of us who trade in complex geostatistical models know otherwise.
“Seroj, I’ll take your “two outlier examples” and see you one nested, multi-level, random effects model relating funding and performance, corrected for spatial autocorrelation.”
Did you provide an actual link, or still too lazy?
Ms Kate, those words are too big for seroj.
His little troll brain can only handle so much complexity. That’s why he feels the need to create his own world - the real one is just too much to handle…
“…or still too lazy?”
I can’t speak for Ms Kate, but I figure I’ve given you enough troll kibble already, besides, I’m actually, you know, working…
opoponax, not trying to hate on your brother, who I’m sure is very capable of making his own decisions, but you could have been describing my brother - except that after a while doing the $7.50/assistant manager thing, realized that was as good as it would get if he didn’t either get an education or learn a trade. Not being handily-inclined, he went to community college, did his gen ed, went to college and last year finished a master’s in information science (like library science plus techy stuff). So that goes back to whoever commented that a strong community college system can be a sort of safety net.
The thing is - my brother had to live those things to get to the place he is now. No one could have “made” him do anything (educationally speaking) at 15 or 16. (Believe me, my parents tried.) He had to want it for himself.
Getting back to the larger point, I don’t think anything about improving vocational programs should preclude teaching kids to read, write and do math well enough to make it back into the college-track if that’s what they eventually decide. And giving kids options would help keep kids who don’t want to go to college (or even just think they don’t) find something of value to keep them coming to school. But too often, vocational programs just become holding pens for non-academic students and smart kids who are genuinely interested in a trade are actively discouraged from going the vo-tech route. It doesn’t have to be that way.
seroj, so what’s your solution to these crappy graduation rates?
I trust you’re not so doctrinaire as to want to REDUCE the funding to urban schools?
(Or is your point just to absorb energy?)
“I trust you’re not so doctrinaire as to want to REDUCE the funding to urban schools?”
I wouldn’t bet on it…
He probably wants mandatory military service, or maybe make Soylent Green out of them…
I don’t think 18 is “old enough” when 16 isn’t.
I don’t think you get what I’m saying. My point is not that you should stick everyone in a holding pattern because they’ll all magically know what they want just a couple of years later (I certainly didn’t), but that if you give all students a certain standard of high school education, they will all be equally able to go on to college if they want, or not go if they don’t want to.
seroj, you want data?
“Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools. In NYC, to give a dramatic example, there are kids in the South Bronx who get about $11,000 a year towards their education while right next door in the white suburb of Bronxville, they get $19,000. Kids that I write about are treated by America as if they were worth half as much as children in the white suburbs.
I often hear privileged white people say, “Well, that doesn’t sound quite fair, but can you really buy your way to a better education for poor kids?” Typically people who ask that question send their kids to Andover and Exeter. And still, the parents who spend $30,000 a year to guarantee their child a royal road into the Ivy League have the nerve to look me in the eyes and ask me about buying your way into a better education.”
Note that New York, the example given to illustrate the national statistic, correlates above with a 47% urban graduation rate and an 83% suburban graduation rate.
From The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol
Regarding graduation on time vs. at 21 — Minneapolis, one of the cities that actually has a relatively low disparity, has a large immigrant population from Ethiopia and Somalia. There are Somalis who arrive in their late teens but use every possible month they can eke out to try to get a diploma (or failing that, to improve their English/literacy/math skills). They’re going to show up in these statistics as students who fail to graduate on time, but I consider them a huge success story.
Educating immigrants who are new not only to the U.S. but to the entire concept of formal schooling is not cheap, however. Oddly, these immigrants have settled mostly in Minneapolis — not in Edina, Eden Prairie, Bloomington, and our other suburban districts. Urban districts may in some cases be better funded in dollars-per-student terms, but that doesn’t mean jack if their resources are stretched ten times as much.
Eric,
Charter schools have worked on a small scale. Magnet schools are another option, but they have a larger downside in that some kids are saved and other rot even more than they were before. A more controversial option is school vouchers, which would likely mean using public money for religious schools, probably Catholic schools, seeing that they already have a large network of schools in place. I can understand why people oppose this last option; I would support it only when the alternative is sending a kid who is already poor to a public school that graduates 40 percent of its students.
The sad truth is that the “system” cannot educate kids who don’t want to be educated. The schools can’t overcome parents who can’t or won’t care.
I have pointed out that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. In fact, for urban districts like KCMO it has had ZERO(!) impact.
What are your suggestions?
#104, I agree.
Every time you give people options, esp. young people, you run the risk of them not making the best decision. But I don’t think that needs to be a bad thing. Esp. if given opportunities to make changes and pursue more education when they’re ready for it.
I’ve known plenty of people in college who had dropped out the first time around and went back when they decided, on their own terms, it was what they wanted. And plenty of people who went straight from high school who didn’t really want to be there. And way too many cranky professors who resented students trying to get their “ticket” into the middle class instead of actually learning anything.
I don’t think anything about improving vocational programs should preclude teaching kids to read, write and do math well enough to make it back into the college-track if that’s what they eventually decide. And giving kids options would help keep kids who don’t want to go to college (or even just think they don’t) find something of value to keep them coming to school.
This is something I very much agree with.
Also, yep, my brother is also pulling himself up, slowly but surely, and will probably eventually end up with some kind of 4-year degree that will rescue him from the fast food ghetto. The operative word being ‘eventually’. The sad thing about him was that he wasn’t so much rebellious, it was more that nobody was really watching out for his long-term interests, and my home state has a terrible education system wherein, as Amanda says, the cracks are the whole point. He’s also one of the main reason I understand why kids who don’t have really attentive and firm parenting often do so poorly in school.
people in college who had dropped out the first time around
Yeah, but that’s the thing.
They had the ability to decide whether or not to go to college in the first place.
It’s pretty easy to move in and out of college once you are given the skills to even have access to it.
It’s damn hard to get to law school from a vocational diploma.
I have pointed out that throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. In fact, for urban districts like KCMO it has had ZERO(!) impact.
What are your suggestions?
1.) Target the money to where it answers the needs of individual schools- building maintenance, expansion of facilities, school breakfast programs, after school support networks…
2.) Put money into professional development including social services, school nurses, and training in finding specific learning impediments.
3.) Stream children who needed additional services into smaller structured classes that can bring them up to speed with the rest of their age groups.
4.) Bring in tutors to target recurring problems that cannot be solved in the classroom. At no point do you institute a ‘first strike, you are out’ policy unless you can prove that you cannot address the underlying problem through other means. Teaching students that they are not welcome in their own school is no way to encourage attendance.
It all takes money and time- the interesting thing is that the longer you apply said money and time the less it takes. It is called investing in the future.
It’s damn hard to get to law school from a vocational diploma.
It’s damn hard to make a living as a plumber with a law degree.
Since when do people with J.D.’s commonly find themselves wishing they had some sort of trade skills to fall back on?
“You don’t really need a brand new, professional-level football field in a school in Texas when you need a set of textbooks in biology (sorry Amanda, but football worship in Texas is in fact insane).”
Without getting too far off-topic, speaking as someone from another football-worshiping state (Ohio) one thing is that many of those field improvements are, in the long run, a saving from the original field after you take into account maintenance costs.
Also, they’re often funded by alumni donations instead of the public (granted, the alumni could’ve used those dollars for books.)
Some people would argue that sports IS education (I benefited enormously in other aspects of life from running cross country and track, and my grades improved enormously after I got into it,) but that’s another whole debate in itself.
I gotta say this discussion has been (depressingly) enlightening, and I have 2 comments I’d like to add.
Re: the classism/racism in zero-tolerance policies. I saw this 1st hand. My high school went to zero-tolerance shortly after Columbine… only that zero-tolerance was immediately deemed to be too harsh and unnecessary when the students with higher grades AND higher family incomes got into trouble. Then it was “no meed to lose our heads over this.”
Re: someone’s comment about the need for good community colleges, I whole heartedly agree with the emphasis being on GOOD. I went to a state university but one summer I worked 2 jobs and took a couple non major specific classes at a CC to save some money. My 1st test was a take home essay test that I spent a whopping 60 minutes on the night before it was due, without cracking open the book (I had left it at work). I ended up getting a perfect score on it and the prof actually held it up as an example to the class of exactly the kind of things she was looking for. If I had written the exact same thing for my high school I would have been laughed out of class. In fact I showed it to my mom (a former high school teacher) afterwards and she basically said she saw more intelligent arguments in her “remedial” classes.
Regularly. Many are the law students who realize too late that the legal profession isn’t what they imagined it to be.
Many are the law students who realize too late that the legal profession isn’t what they imagined it to be.
Yes, but they have multiple degrees which give them plenty of other options. They are also well equipped to go into academia or business school if that interests them.
I guess it’s possible that there are some people out there who go through the 7+ years of post-high school education it takes to become a lawyer and then realize they really wanted to be a plumber all along, but I would think that people who have those kinds of resources can probably find a way to work that out somehow.
Yeah, but that’s the thing.
They had the ability to decide whether or not to go to college in the first place.
It’s pretty easy to move in and out of college once you are given the skills to even have access to it.
A basic high school education, until the age of 18, does not guarantee one the ability to decide whether or not to go to college.
A high school transcript with barely passing grades will not get one into college. It may be enough for community college. But poorly performing students still tend to need remedial classes before they can do college level work.
One thing that does stand in the way of providing students such an education is the fact that, if they don’t already plan on going to college, they will not put in the effort to gain from what is being taught. (Other reasons are piss-poor quality teachers and curriculum, etc.)
The lure of a quality vocational school is much more likely to make non-college-bound students work for the grades they need to get in. And, more generally, when people CHOOSE something, they almost always put a lot more effort into it and get a lot more out of it.
There’s just no benefit, past a certain age, in detaining students in schools they don’t want to be in, taking classes they get no enjoyment or value from.
And don’t forget, another thing gained by going to a voc school at 16 (rather than 18) is 2 more years of lifetime earnings. That could come in handy if a kid later decided he wanted a college degree.
And it doesn’t have to mean they need to jump through burning loops or anything to switch later. There could be crossover paths.
This report is underreported in part because it’s depressing and scary, but also because there is some ambiguity.
It’s an interesting report and worth reading before you get too freaked about how much public schools suck.
It tracks enrollments in each grade 9-12th as compared to final graduation — within the same district. It does not count student who get GEDs. It does not track students who graduate in more than 4 years (delayed due to illness, pregnancy, repeating a grade, etc.) , or graduate someplace else – possibly not included in the sample districts. (e.g. Finishing at a private school, an un-sampled school district or even a home-school program).
The broad conclusion is: More kids enter High School in 9th grade in the sample districts than graduate in 4 years from the sample districts. There are lots of reasons for this and it’s not a new phenomenon. The rates are higher in inner city areas with higher unemployment, lower economic strata and at the bottom of the list are areas with that plus negative population growth – people with kids moving away presumably for economic reasons. (yes,I read the report and noted the exceptions that prove the rule)
It does point out problems in how school districts report graduation rates. It also points out something we already know. Economic class is more important determiner of academic success than race or how much money a school district spends per pupil.
Amada point’s out, “There are numerous, complex factors that feed these alarming drop-out rates, but we can’t let the deliberate machinations of the system that encourage dropping out for certain students off the hook.”
I’d just add that the drop out rates maybe aren’t as alarming as this study seems to suggest. We need to ask what are we keeping students “on the hook” for? Our educational system will find ways to make drop out rates go down if we make it an issue. I can imagine lots of draconian, authoritarian solutions for this “problem” that would still leave significant numbers of graduates unprepared for life after school.
I’ll use the same quote of Amanda’s that I led off with:
“Underfunding urban schools is a big part of the problem, of course, the major one.”
That quote was IN THE PARAGRAPH that I cited, the one that it enumerated those “complex causes” of the high drop out rate.
It is one line out of the entire post; Are you honestly suggesting that it’s the main idea?
Usually, the main idea is a theme that seems to recur, say something like
Instead of addressing the actual point (”Some education reforms seem specifically designed to force poor children and minorities to drop out of school; we must be on our guard against these methods of gaming the system.”), you’ve focused on one lousy line (and it was throwaway, hand-wave line that Amanda used to dismiss that particular topic as not relevant to this point at that). And you’ve managed to drag the whole thread along with you, and everyone is discussing about whether or not underfunding is the core problem and what the solution might be.
Ironically, what’s been forgotten is the underlying problem: how do we implement ANY reform proposal fairly and equitably, especially as long as the people in charge seem bent on taking what could be a workable approach and using it as a club to beat on the poor and minority students in their district?
For reading comprehension and counter-arguments, you’d get a failing grade. For classic trolling style and successful thread derailment, though, you definitely earn high marks.
Congratulations.
All that’s left is to call the other commenters stupid and storm off in a flurry of electrons.
Ah Dorvl, jores just wants to be backward. He wants to see all public schools end up like the Boston system did under court-ordered bussing.
In that situation, there was not enough money for schools and never was going to be enough. The crooked politics of the system meant that meager resources were rationed according to what kind of people were being served. Thus the white neighborhoods had good schools, working class white neighborhoods had adequate schools, and everyone else got shit.
The answer to “no separate but equal” was a plan designed to scare whites by busing in blacks, and immediately remove the pretense that there was enough funding by gutting the well-funded schools and making all the schools shitty.
Never in their life would the Boston Schools have even considered letting taxpaying citizens of color have adequately funded schools that privileged neighborhoods received. Making it a zero sum game made it possible to whip up a racist frenzy that blamed the blacks and propelled the racists like Dapper O’Neill into permanent positions rather than remediate the inequities with even marginally higher taxes.
I think everyone should be expected to begin a vocational skill in high school, as well as get the academic base that might be needed for college later. (Pity it’s expensive.) We might have fewer stupid desk decisions.
This dynamic is a huge part of why I think investment in Community Colleges (not just of taxpayer dollars, but also the “moral investment” of taking them seriously, and not regarding them as either do-over schools or merely a cheaper track into “real colleges” for the less successful recent HS graduates) is so important.
Mind, I’m painfully aware that a part of my emphasis is due to cynical despair at the ability of modern US society to do K-12 right the first time. I’m quite sure that we ought to be able to do better for kids, who are required by law to attend these institutions until they are 18 (or so). The school system we have is turning more and more into something like a prison. We can do better and should for the sake of the kids themselves, not to mention the welfare of society down the line.
That said, I suppose that to a certain degree any school system for minors is going to have a certain authoritarian edge to it; perhaps some of that is inherent in the situation. By the time we reformed our schools enough to satisfy basic human rights for the kids, we would have to demonstrate on a continental scale theories of education that are, to put it mildly, regarded as Utopian by mainstream Conventional Wisdom.
So, based on my own life experience, I am skeptical that any school system for minors, forbidden (as they should be) from holding full-time jobs or being truly independent and fully responsible for their own lives, can possibly prepare them for life as free and independent adults. Perhaps it is just as well that we try to cram in a curriculum of facts, half-truths, and platitudes. Frankly, I don’t know how much emphasis to put on quality learning before the age of 18. Given that our society has failed at it so spectacularly (and given that plenty of people deemed “smart” by that system, like yours truly, or expensively culitivated in absurdly expensive and exclusive private schools, like for instance the current President (or just about any President or Presidential candidate in our history) turn out not to be particularly “smart” in a useful, real-world sense)–I hope at any rate that the window for learning doesn’t swing shut at age 18, and that we can in fact redeem some of our collective negligance by holding the door open for serious study for everyone, at any age.
Because based on my life experience it does make a difference when one is choosing, freely, to go to school, versus doing it either because it is just the thing one mindlessly does in a “normal” life or simply because the law says you have to.
Perhaps I was spoiled because Pasadena City College was, when I went there (after 3 years at Caltech, in the late 1980s) a very good school indeed. But part of my attachment to the place was that I felt it was to an extent an embodiment of a notion of community colleges expounded by an essay C Wright Mills wrote in the late 1940s:
To wit, it was not narrowly focused on preparing recent HS grads (or dropouts) to get “back on track” by belatedly transfering into “real colleges”–though if graduating from a “good” 4-year university is one’s goal, getting there via a CC can be a very smart way to do it. PCC certainly had legions of young adults fresh out of HS, as well as large numbers of students essentially on the same track but delayed. But, echoing Mills’s perhaps Utopian vision, PCC also attracted adults who had no particular academic goals beyond the challenge and interest of the courses themselves. And it had a hefty proportion of various career-focused courses, some of which blurred the lines between “vocational” and “academics;” others of which were quite aggresively focused on a particular job. (I considered taking a few auto mech classes for instance, to get a bit of mechanical savvy, but you had to commit to a full load in their curriculum to be permitted to take any.)
The upshot, in many of my classes, was that they were filled with an eclectic mix of students. And that mixing was reflected in the teaching staff as well. In many courses, the teachers were a mix of professionals who actually worked in the fields they were teaching, and educators who specialized in teaching as such–and in a good department, the upshot was that each type’s strengths rubbed off on the others, resulting in a cadre of teachers who both knew how to teach a diverse group of adults and also had real-world, up-to-date contact with the work world that they were preparing their students for.
Consider the potential political dimensions of such an institution. You gather together young adults, with much (if not all) of the freedom of traditional college students, with established members of the community with decades of real world experience, and ask them to take time for serious and potentially deep thought. I think it could become the brain of grassroots democracy.
And, in the 1980s, I feared that the reactionaries knew that, and feared it, and were in the process of cracking down. Actually, I now suppose that this conflict has been ongoing since before Mills wrote the essay and probably will be indefinitely into the future. This is why the negative images of the community college, as a second or even third-rate consolation prize for losers (pretty much what my mother said they were when I first told her I would be attending one) has been cultivated, and of course often enforced by selective funding, mandates from governments, etc. This is one reason that there might be limited enthusiasm for funding the Millsian version of a CC, and why people would hardly expect such vibrant potentials to exist in their familiar CC.
But the basic point is, perhaps we would do better, at least from the point of view of people intelligently choosing their career paths and applying themselves to the studies necessary for their own goals, to maintain and expand and expect more of community colleges. Perhaps it is vain to expect US society to provide anything like educational equal opportunity in K-12, and to hope to compensate by opening the doors freely to adults. Certainly all the jargon and buzzwords about the increasingly rapid pace of technical and structural change, which puts a premium on people re-inventing themselves frequently in their personal careers, would be better addressed by good and inexpensive schools for adults, rather than trying to outguess the unpredictable job markets of the future on behalf of high school kids.
That all said:
Yep. Even at as good a school as PCC, I encountered several varieties of “teachers from Hell”–the abusive, the mind-numbingly dull, the flakes. But while the kind of low-grade teacher you describe probably would not last too long at a 4-yr college, there are plenty of the other kinds of bad teachers at any of them.
But adult students, even young adults, have much greater freedom to challenge them, or at least to avoid them, than HS kids just about ever have.
I have a now-transgendered, FTM brother, who, when she was my sister, was placed as a sophomore in a bad math class in HS. She had done fine in math hitherto, but she, and she soon found, essentially all her classmates, did terribly in this one–because the teacher would not teach math. She simply repeated the words in text, over and over, with increasing exasperation, until the kids shut up and left her alone. When my sister realized this, she documented the situation meticulously, and went to the school authorities, who told her to shut up. This teacher, you see, was the wife of the very popular band teacher, and it would hardly do to upset him, never mind the fate of kids who might have their math education permantanly, irrevocably (in the rigidly tracked world of HS curriculum and subsequent college admissions–not to mention the psychological barriers to future math learning a poor math teacher assigning humiliating grades could build in their minds) ruined.
Much of the same damage can be done by bad teachers in colleges, but students there have more autonomy and more recognized authority, and can therefore better work around a bad situation. And if a community college system is as subsidized as California’s, the dollar cost of taking classes, and repeating them if necessary, is so low that a student can either batter their way through the occasional roadblock in the curriculum, or (depending on how oriented they are toward satisfying the demands of other institutions) defy curriculum requirements outright.
Bad teaching ought not be tolerated anywhere; certain kinds of it can unfortunately find a refuge even at a good CC–but other kinds find perhaps more damaging refuge elsewhere.
And on the other hand–the very best teacher I ever had the fortune to meet was Dr Betty Kovacs, of the PCC English Department. And for every nerd, flake, or nut-job I ever found teaching there (a hand full), I took classes from at least two competent and one excellent teacher.
As a practical matter, difficult or despicable teachers are part of that “diversity” we need to embrace. They aren’t good as such, but learning to deal with them or at least avoid them is a valuable life lesson in itself–better to learn it as a free CC student than a bound HS student, or at our pricier colleges.
Philadelphia public schools receive approximately $7000-$9000 LESS per student than the surrounding suburbs.
As long as the US funds public schools primarily as a meritocracy, with much of the funding coming from or based on property taxes, the poor will get shafted.
NCLB penalizes underperforming schools (those whose students do poorly on standardized testing) by restricting funds to them.
Yes, I know! It makes no sense! These would seem to be the schools whose students need more resources, not less.
By the way, under NCLB, all students, with the exception of those who are severelly mentally delayed, must take standardized testing.
So that means that those student who score 3 IQ points above the MR cut-off, those 8th graders who read at a kindergarten or first-grade level, whose math skills are limited to adding and subtracting single-digit numbers, take the SAME TESTS as all other 8th graders.
And if their tests scores help place their school in the ranks of the underperforming?
Less resources for their school, and for them.
Thanks our president for this stellar system.
Yikes–my apologies for the lack of spell-checking.
“Philadelphia public schools receive approximately $7000-$9000 LESS per student than the surrounding suburbs.”
For example, in Lower Merion (which, as Wikipedia points out, is “the heart of the affluent Pennsylvania Main Line series of suburban communities” right outside of Philly, with a median family income of $115,69 and only 1.9% of families below the poverty line (and only 1 murder in 2003, according to this sketchy-looking site)), the school district was able to spend $17, 184/student for a student population that was 6.6% low income in 2005-06. In Philadelphia, on the other hand (median income $37, 036, 18.4% of families below the poverty line, [wikipedia], and too frequently racking up at least one murder a day), the school district was able to spend only $9,512/student for a population that was 72.9% low-income that year.
- School district information from the recent and very interesting PA costing out study; see for example here. (According to the researchers, Lower Merion SD is one of the few districts spending more than it needs to, and could get by with not quite $2,000 more than Philly’s currently spending).
It’s important to think about the underfunding argument in this context. In terms of mainstream academic success, the average Lower Merion kindergartener is starting out with a whole set of overlapping advantages - a rather good chance: of basic economic and physical security, high level of maternal (and paternal) education, bedtime stories and frequent library trips, an upbringing that emphasizes the skills and attitudes valued in school, not much opportunity to injest lots of lead for e-z baby brain damage, etc., etc., etc. The average Philadelphia kindergardener is a lot less likely to have such advantages; in fact, they have a rather good chance of a whole set of overlapping disadvantages, up to and including high levels of lead exposure.
The fairly obvious conclusion is that poor urban (and rural, too) districts should be funded a fair bit better than affluent, often suburban ones. But the picture’s actually worse than it looks at first glance. If I understand the way that study presents that data, a fair chunk of Phllly SD spending (as mentioned above for Washington) is going to things like making sure the kids actually get at least two meals a day and so on, in an desperate attempt to slightly balance out the vast gulf between places a few miles apart.
I think that part of the issue is the schools and that the kids aren’t as stupid as the teachers.
Many of the teachers are overpaid and under medicated.
I suffered through a public school system. I had several teachers that were overtly evil and as useful as tits on a snake. One fine example of the tenure system would incite bullies in his classes to terrorize nerdy students and would consistently grade girls in the front row higher than boys. He was useless as a ‘teacher’ and ended up imparting a cynical view of the profession of teaching. But the administrators would wring their hands and say that he had tenure.
Another teacher was fresh out of the local psych unit, for the 3rd time. The semester after I had her for english she checked herself back in.
I did have one teacher that I met in junior high and then had as a teacher twice in senior high who was priceless. He saw the bullshit and would occasionally be called upon to talk a student out of the trees over some of the bizarre treatment by many of the teachers. And he couldn’t get tenure. He was bounced around a whole lot from grade to grade.
I find it hard sometimes to defend the educational system from the fundie hoards that seek its destruction. Some teachers don’t get paid enough and too many get paid more than they deserve. School administrators who have the intelligence of the planners for the Iraq war sop up money and are either clueless to help or actively participate in the destruction of the institution of public education.
I remember a principal in high school who had a huge cup hanging from his office wall. Yes, a ‘cup’! I heard a rumour that he was quietly reassigned when an affair with a student came to light. He was a useless frat boy.
But I had a very limited number teachers that stood out. Mr Nelson, Mr. LeMeiux, and a scant few others…
Tenure may belong in a university but IMO is disgusting in earlier educational settings.
I remember a teacher that nearly always showed up drunk or hungover. He had ‘tenure’.
The kids aren’t alright and they know a bullshit situation when they see it. Many get frustrated at having to deal with these gatekeepers of their future.
And I look at my partner and see their private schooling and wonder how things could have been different had I had the opportunity they had in my education. But life goes on. Interesting that I am now looking to go ‘back to school’ and looking to change careers because of the wonderful morass that the ‘Bush economy’ has created. Anyone want to hire a late 40’s computer expert?
“Anyone want to hire a late 40’s computer expert?”
Pinky, you mean you’re an expert in computers based on vacuum-tubes and relays with hand wiring for programming? Really?…
As another IT guy in his late 40’s, I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes it feels like I must be old enough to have known Charles Babbage personally.
IT is not kind to those who get old without moving to upper management. The job landscape gets pretty barren for those of us with gray hair…
Good luck with your quest. And know there are many more of us out here in the same aged and leaking boat…
the opoponax
April 7, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Since when do people with J.D.’s commonly find themselves wishing they had some sort of trade skills to fall back on?
I don’t know how common it is but I know three. One was pushed by his family to get his law degree, they worked long hours and sacrificed and after he made it, he found that the stress was killing him. He is now a mason like his father and his grandfather. Another was in corporate tax law and the hours were excruciating. To get time with his family he opted to go back to school and become a teacher. A third is now a plumber after he realized that he simply wasn’t cut out for the culture of a law office.
Not everyone is ideal for every job and school should be structured to present ALL students with as many options as possible. It is bad enough that media presents wildly skewed views of ‘popular/successful/high paying’ careers without schools doing the same thing. This is part of what leads to NCLB type legislation, the belief at the highest level that if you aren’t going to make it as a lawyer/doctor/CEO then why bother educating you in the first place. Sink or swim with the definition of what it means to swim be Olympic gold medalist.
Wow that came out harsher than I thought.
But there were kids that could ‘milk the system’.
I often wonder what about them allowed them to succeed in that environment. Most were from more well to do families but there were some that weren’t.
I really think that it’s the family structure that they come from and return to. I feared school just about as much as being at home. I was constantly picked on and beaten at home and school. My psyche was so battered as a child. (Did I mention that I was an ‘Army-brat’? Yet another generation of victims of Bush’s war is being bred right now at this very minute. A whole host of silent victims of the war on democracy.)
I can’t fault my past for the future and have tried hard to get past it. And this is turning out to get too close to the bone but suffice it to say that the reason why American education sucks has a multitude of reasons. Yes tenure plays a role but so does the familial stress and home life. My therapy was getting a motorcycle in high school. Escapism takes many forms. Pre-mix fumes and chain lube stench coupled with bugs in my teeth and dirt in my ears was what kept me sane in the insane world I knew. Thank you Mr. Suzuki!
And people wonder why I laugh when they talk about public education being no place to have sex ed. HAH!!!
‘Have a nice day’
I worked with the first browser. I remember when 14.4 was fast for dialup.
I fell in love with Lisa.
The Apple Lisa.
I’ve seen so much and am glad to have been a part of it. But ‘Now watch this drive’ Bush and his unpatriotic ‘base’ have decimated the industry and this country. I have a better chance of getting hired in India as a native than I do here. (Or in China)
Ahh the time we live in… The future so uncertain.
Hawise, the guy who did the carpentry in our kitchen has an advanced physics degree. His carpenter wife has an advanced mathematics degree.
You were saying?
Ms. Kate- I’m saying that we make a lot of choices in our teens and twenties that we may change in our thirties and forties, a solid base education lets us make changes. Ultimately we have to base our lives on what works for us and not some dreamy societal goal. The systems that we put into place need to be based on the idea that we get the most people to the greatest number of options and then we leave the choices up to them. Much of current education policy is based on limiting options as too dangerous, bad for society or, my favorite- not appropriate, with what is appropriate undefined.
It is appropriate for someone to want to attain an advanced degree and to be given every chance to gain that degree, it is equally appropriate for them to decide after they have it that they would be happier doing something else. It is equally appropriate for someone to decide that they don’t want an advanced degree but want the option to gain it at a later date. The education is never wasted, it is simply applied in a different context. Going for an education system that opens everyone’s options up is very expensive, the only thing more expensive is NOT doing it.
Ms. Kate- I’m saying that we make a lot of choices in our teens and twenties that we may change in our thirties and forties, a solid base education lets us make changes. Ultimately we have to base our lives on what works for us and not some dreamy societal goal. The systems that we put into place need to be based on the idea that we get the most people to the greatest number of options and then we leave the choices up to them. Much of current education policy is based on limiting options as too dangerous, bad for society or, my favorite- not appropriate, with what is appropriate undefined.
It is appropriate for someone to want to attain an advanced degree and to be given every chance to gain that degree, it is equally appropriate for them to decide after they have it that they would be happier doing something else. It is equally appropriate for someone to decide that they don’t want an advanced degree but want the option to gain it at a later date. The education is never wasted, it is simply applied in a different context. Going for an education system that opens everyone’s options up is very expensive, the only thing more expensive is NOT doing it.
If my break weren’t ending right now, I’d share my own experiences with NCLB.
Let me just say this–my skepticism about the USA having the political and social will to provide good K-12 education is based on my disillusionment before NCLB and the associated testing mainia even took effect.
I agree it has only gotten worse since then.
KTHNXBYE for now…
Sorry for the double post, my bad.
With articles and controversies like this, is it any wonder kids drop out?