Quote:
Originally Posted by Bobo Fett
OK, so obviously a lot more complicated than making sure everyone gets the same money. Fair enough. But as for your question about Milwaukee - a similar question could be asked about US K-12 education as a whole. The US is one of the top spenders in the OECD, but doesn't seem to have the results to match.
The USA is a big place. Those huge cities with spectacularly terrible results bring our average down quite a bit.
If you could do a Freaky Friday style school system swap between Milwaukee and Helsinki, do you think that would solve all of Milwaukee's education problems? No, and I suspect the children of Helsinki wouldn't suddenly end up with 30% lower graduation rates, either.
Quote:
But...could not two things be possible at the same time? For example, cities like Milwaukee getting poor results no matter how much money you throw at the problem, while there could be other places where wealthy areas (and subsequently well-funded districts) have correspondingly better results than poorer areas?
I think the achievement gap boils down to the differences in home life and parental involvement. If you ever need some true peace and quiet, show up at a random MPS school during parent/teacher conference nights. You'll see a few parents, but it's a sad state of affairs.
Quote:
Whatever the results might be, I can't see how it's healthy to have a system where the wealthiest neighborhoods have the best-funded schools.
Most US state governments agree with you, which is why this isn't how it works. Not all states are created equal, however. We have a few states where the entire system is just grossly underfunded and you have teachers making about as much as an Amazon warehouse worker. The
only thing keeping them in the classroom is passion, and that really limits your pool of qualified applicants.
On the other hand you have places like Milwaukee, who pay their teachers well and have fantastic benefits. Still, they have nearly 40% turnover by year 3 because no amount of money is worth being called a c**t all day long by a bunch of 9 year olds and breaking up your 6th fight of the day, running the very real risk of losing your job because you touched a student in the process. I'm not a prude; I went to a Lutheran school growing up and there were some girls at the 8th grade dance showing off their tits in the locker room, but a colleague of my wife had to break up a pair of 5th graders who were having sex in a bathroom in the middle of the school day, which is not an uncommon occurrence. These behavior problems aren't the school's fault, but they are the ones tasked with somehow working around them and producing educated children in the end.
This sort of thing isn't unique to big cities, but it's much easier to deal with 1 problem child in a class of 30 than it is to deal with 8 of them all feeding off each other while the rest of the class waits for the adults to try and manage the chaos.
Families will solve this, not the government.