My contention is that parents with enormous access to resources when their children are 0-3 would drastically raise the floor of children who are already irretrievably behind the 8-ball when kindergarten starts. To the extent kids start kindergarten already being able to read would massively increase outcomes. Of course the entire welfare state needs massive expansion to ensure those same parents don’t have to work 60-70 hours per week to exceed the poverty line in order to make sure their more advanced kids can eat when they are in primary school. I think by junior high and high school, children become far more self-motivated and there could be a gradual reduction in school resources and concomitant increase in general welfare spending.

ACES research strongly suggests that educational development and even IQ are massively correlated to adverse childhood experiences (all of which are of course almost causally related to poverty).

It’s not that money doesn’t work, it’s that money needs to be started earlier and it needs to be increased. It’s as if we have been giving the patient a minuscule dosage of medicine and saying the medicine doesn’t work.

Then what is your position, exactly? If you aren't talking about achievement gaps, then perhaps you should be. That's a lot more consequential to society than the size and level of finishes in school auditoriums between rich vs poor districts.

Your OP was about admission screening and the second post is a bunch of nonsense SJW rhetoric. That private school can focus on stupid initiatives like replacing all of their social studies curriculum with black empowerment and the history and dangers of white supremacy because they don't have actual problems to tackle. Like kids coming to school with clean clothes or the constant literal fighting that goes on in classrooms.

You can't just replace the admissions process of high performing schools with a lottery and expect to solve inner city education. You need to fix their parents, and you need that to start well before their first day at school.

You thought I started the thread because I thought I had all the answers?

You thought I started the thread to advocate for the all the measures implemented by DeBlasio and all the the measures proposed by the teachers at Dalton?

I don't know what I think about the former. As for the latter, some of the Dalton proposals seem fine or inconsequential. Others seem detrimental at worst and wildly unrealistic at best.

I think before anyone talks about school funding amounts, we need to address how the money gets spent. Upwards of 80% of a school's budget goes to payroll. The issue is, the union(s) prevent maximizing the return on that investment. I'm all for paying teachers more, but I'm adamantly opposed to paying teachers more without that pay being tied to results. Teacher unions actively compete with the public's interst, just as all public sector unions do, but I don't think you can win local elections without the teacher unions.
How much is NYC spending for their plan, and they about to learn that varience will prevent a perfect distribution.

Teacher merit pay makes sense as a thought experiment, but the implementation is nigh impossible. Paying districts based on results is how we've gotten to where we are today with the behavior issues. DPI tracks stats on suspensions and expulsions and that has just led to schools refusing to issue punishments so as not to tarnish their stats.

Teaching to tests happens already, and tying actual teacher pay to those tests can only make the current situation worse. I don't know the name of it, but I'm sure there's a "law" out there that basically says once you start making decisions based on metrics, they cease to be useful metrics.

We need what would probably best be described as military-style boarding schools to send the 15% of kids in the inner city who are ruining the education of their peers. That'll make a bigger dent in outcomes than any merit pay program. Your kid gets picked up in August, and we'll deliver them back to you in June. The teachers know who these 15% are. We're poisoning an entire generation because it's uncomfortable to label certain kids as a lost cause.

If I went to rural West Virginia, or rural Texas, or rural New York, or rural Pennsylvania, I would find few, if any, problem students, right? In others words, disruptive students are mostly an inner city problem, right?

What a ****ing joke.

Wherever you find severely lacking districts, you'll find behavior problems. It's just that simple.

Right. But like you said, the best place to look for this problem is the "inner city." It's virtually unheard of in rural areas, even in rural areas that are plagued by high levels of opioid or meth abuse.

Sorry for using my own locale as a baseline for the statement. In Southeastern Wisconsin, the schools in question are invariably in Milwaukee's inner city. This is not to say that ALL inner city schools are a problem, because that's not true either. Some have managed to cultivate a reputation for excellence and draw the attention of parents who care about their kids' education. Involved and truly engaged parents make all the difference in keeping kids on a productive path.

Swap "inner city" with whatever shorthand you'd use in West Virginia to describe the problem areas and move on. It's those 6 or 7 kids in the class of 30 that prevent any meaningful education from taking place. They need to be escorted out of the building and put on a bus to military school. You are entitled to a public education, but if you refuse to accept it, we need to stop letting you ruin it for the rest of your peers.

Canada is usually ranked top 5 in the world in K-12 education. In our district, over 91% of our budget goes to payroll, and there is absolutely no tying of pay to results. Nor tying funding to results. And AFAIK, this is the case across the country.

Well, the last part is a good result, even if it's for the wrong reasons. Suspensions and expulsions aren't the answer, and should be used sparingly IMO.

Wow. Just, wow.

Has it ever occurred to you that the "problem" with inner city schools might not be the behaviour of the students, but their socio-economic status? If you really think that 15% of the kids need to be written off as lost causes and sent to a military school, you have zero credibility on this topic IMO.

As an outside observer, I see a couple of issues that seem to plague the US K-12 education system:

- Funding based on results. This one just boggles my mind. SO many problems with this.
- Two (or multi) tier education system. We have private schools here, but the difference in education isn't all that dramatic. From everything I read, it sounds like the US has huge discrepancies between the education available at different schools.

Again, these are just my observations as someone with no experience in the US system, so I could be off on either of these.

NO children are "lost causes!" ANY child can succeed given a chance with proper guidance and LOVE!

Correct. You're looking at this as someone without any experience in one of the schools that have a problem.

You probably live in a world where when kids misbehave, they are scolded and sent to the principal's office. Parents are called and those parents hand down their own punishments. There is peer pressure to reform their behavior or risk being outcasts.

Your kids will never know what it's like to have to go to school and sit in a room where 80% of the teacher's time is spent on behavior problems of only a handful of your classmates.


This is beyond the scope of a public education. Assuming you can even get these kids to come to school more than 60% of the time, you only have them for 7 hours a day, and they're in a classroom with 35 other kids, some of which are more screwed up than they are.

lol, ask him how he plans on funding these military schools.

Canada pays less than the US (per student, ~11K CAD - 12K USD), maybe we spend too much money?

Also, education does not scale well, at least yet. Canada probably has less students per teacher. EDIT: Turns out the US is lower, but States like CA are significantly higher).

Finally, I'm not talking about incentive pay, I'm taking about getting rid of bad teachers, and paying to attract top talent. That's never gonna happen with Teachers unions.

Also inside school grounds. At my private high school we had 2 African-American students out of a student body of 500 my first year. By the beginning of my 3rd year there were 5, but 4 out of 5 of left that year for public school. All of them left because of the racism from students/staff. (in supposedly tolerant san francisco bay area)

All the well intentioned efforts won't make students of color feel comfortable in an environment where racism is encouraged.

The vision that Inso0 (and many other conservatives) have for American education is the vision that Charles Murray set out in a book he wrote in the late 1980s called In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government.

That vision essentially amounts to:

-- Don't bother with increasing per pupil spending. You can't increase it enough to make a difference. For example, if you increase teacher salaries by a realistic amount of $10k per teacher or whatever, you will simply attract more people who think it would be cool to have summers off.

--Maximize school choice. Attentive parents of kids in bad schools would move their kids to better schools if they had more options. Kids with the most problems and the least engaged parents will be left behind in the worst schools. But that's better than letting those kids **** things up for all the other kids.

Make of that what you will. This book was written before the The Bell Curve, during a time when Murray was taken quite a bit more seriously than he is now.

Simple privatize all schools

Not possible to do so without BLOATING stupid costly administration beyond anything approaching ROI.

Test scores are bad, “assessors’” judgment is worse, and even intra-year improvement measures are fraught with peril.

It’s very very very easy: if you pay teachers a lot more you will get enormously more qualified candidates and guess what students will learn more.

Tbf the military budget is much larger than education.

You’re acting as if an organization that prioritizes improving its members’ conditions (pay + all collateral issues) is a detriment to encouraging top talent? Jesus. You realize GOP legislatures want to pay them less and make their conditions worse. They’re the enemy. Unions are at worst a neutral factor and far more likely a benefit.

Just search "Violence in the classroom" on Google and spend some time reading the stories and watching the videos. This is not a money problem.

You can absolutely increase the quality of teachers. We'd be fools to say that a $15/hr starting salary attracts the highest quality candidates, but teaching has always been a passion job and most schools are just fine. The worst ones drag our overall average down, and those worst schools have a behavior problem, not a money problem.

You're a fool to think that the union would allow significant changes to existing personnel if we quadrupled the pay of teachers over night. Such a change would take many years to bear fruit.

This is true. The lack of diversity is a problem. I just wanted to point out it's very difficult to get enough qualified URM students to round out the ratios.

It's almost a chicken/egg problem. Qualified URM students have options outside of the private/boarding schools that lead to comparable education/career outcomes. They just don't have an incentive to deal with the BS that comes with being the spearheads of URM breaking into boarding/private schools. One of the issues is URM parents have concerns that their kids will lose their identity and come out whitewashed. But without a critical mass of URM students, private schools will have a hard time learning what URM students need to become an integrated part of the school community.

The issue is not the top talent, it's the median talent. If a bad teacher is taking a portion of a finite budget, what does that do? That's one less competent teacher you can have employed, or less you can pay competent teachers. It decreases the efficacy and efficiency of dollars spent. I'm not talking about union busting, but I am talking about Democrats negotiating this stuff...

Search rubber rooms.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna31494...want%20to%20do.

The but GOP is worse argument is bullshit... especially when it comes to URM's, which are mostly under the purview of DNC mayors. The GOP is a non-factor. By and large unions have ran roughshod over city governments. It's led to bad cops and teachers.

Thousands of posters later and HIV still doesn't know what "DNC" means

I suggested that I may be off because of my lack of direct experience with the US system, not because I have no understanding of inner-city schools. I'm not claiming I'm an education expert, far from it, but I know enough to understand that your ideas about what the problems are with inner-city schools and how to solve them are incredibly ridiculous.

Anyone who suggests:

really shouldn't be taken seriously.

I highly doubt the "median talent" is anywhere near the biggest issue.

If we had less students per teacher, we likely wouldn't be paying less than the US per student.

So, let's review the data so far. Canada ranks considerably higher than the US in many international K-12 rankings, and your information suggests Canada spends less on education. Teachers in Canada are unionized, and there isn't any merit-based pay. Why is it you're so sure that the solution lies in merit-based pay? It seems to me that will do nothing more than make an existing problem worse - too much emphasis on standardized testing, and rewarding districts, schools, and teachers whose students achieve the best results on said tests.