> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.

The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".

I think the answer to this is that schooling/care for people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school should be a totally different budget with different success criteria than the budget for normal school.

There are two different and contradictory goals here- the current dynamic where every gain for one is a loss for the other creates a ton of bad outcomes across the board.

"people with disabilities that make it impossible for them to succeed in normal school" is not a clearly divisible population from the regular student population though. Many (but not all) districts deal with disabilities via IEPs, or Individual Education Plans. They are tailored to particular students, and can be fairly common. They make things less of a clear binary than 2 separate school systems would really need.

It's worse because there's been a trend among elite districts to push students to (fraudulently) get a diagnosed disability, so that they can get accommodations on tests and raise their chances to be admitted to an elite university. So, a proposal to partition the school system into a lesser system for students with disabilities would face pushback by the aforementioned elite district parents. While they are participating in a fraud (and so it would perhaps be morally fine for them to face repercussions for it), I imagine it would make implementing any such plan very difficult.

Yep, the abuse is happening over here in slovenia too, you get some diagnosis for the kid, you get 50% more test-taking time, extra help in school, extra accomodations for other stuff, and in the end, your grade is worth the same (for grade averages and high school or college acceptance) as someone elses who finished in regular amount of time. No remarks anywhere saying "while student A and B have the same point average, student B had 50% more time on the test".

So yeah, I kinda understand why parents get the diagnoses for their kids, but the system is unfair.

Giving accomodations during a test kind of invalidates the test as a measurement of relative ability, or aptitude for further studies, so perhaps the solution is to stop doing that

In my experience ( to be fair which was a while ago ) things like that just end up making things worse trapping people and leading to a lot of lashing out

Honestly education really feels overthought and micromanaged already the whole setup is unhealthy

The current situation, where students succeed regardless if they completely failed to learn and do zero work is also pretty bad

You're too optimistic on the skills of teachers and school admin.

Let's ignore good teachers and principals, they aren't an issue.

Bad teachers and admin will do what bad students do when facing a high stakes test - forget that learning is important and just do a crap job gaming the test, and often do worse than if they would focus on just doing the content properly.

A bunch of people here probably don't see the issue - they think that they would do a good job learning or teaching a student when focusing on a specific test. But it's not the good teachers and good students who are the issue. A bad teacher might give students the same past paper every week for a year, and their bad students just memorise the right answers for the multiple choice. This is just an example, there are lots of bad strategies and the bad teachers will find them all (while the good teachers ignore all the noise).

It's the bad teachers and students that the system needs to fix, and too heavy an exam focus will screw it up (as will zero exam focus).

"Well just fire the bad teachers lol" um ... ok ... that's a bold strategy, but you can't axe that many and not massively increase their salaries to find replacements. You want super star individual performers, you gotta pay to attract them. You want a cheap consistent workforce where the bad eggs do less damage, focus on a good process that the weaker ones can follow, not rewards for individual success.

In what was in my time yugoslavia and isn't anymore, we had a similar system and it worked great.

From the austria-hungary time, the primary school (8 years, ~6/7 to 14/15yo, now 9 years, where preschool became year 1) was mandatory, and after that it was your decision what to do next.

You could then go to a "general high school" (gymnasium) for the next 4 years, and some of them were better than others (mostly because of students, but teachers too), and you had to collect enough points from grades and standardized testing in primary school to be accepted there. All the illiterate idiots didn't have enough points to get accepted, so you'd be in a nice class with comparable peers and teachers could teach new stuff instead of repeat the stuff the students should already know. The classes were "general" (math, languages, history, geography, etc.) and the idea was to prepare you for college.

The less-smart students went either to "not that good" gymnasiums or to other highschools, like the one for electricians or construction workers, farmers, etc., where they would get the legally required education to later eg. become an electrician or something after 3 years or 4, without the need for college or extra schooling and with the reduced amount of "general" subjects (only 1 or two years of history instead of 4, etc.).

The system somehow worked and still does.

> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.

Most struggling students are not special ed. It's a serious mistake to conflate the two. In some ways special ed students are taken better care of than the typical remedial student, since training for special ed happens to focus on effective instructional methods (such as direct instruction) that are actively deplored by most progressive educators as "demeaning" towards their profession.

I’m not going to defend the broader plan (I don’t believe in it, or at least, I haven’t thought about it enough to be convinced either way). But for the ejection issue, one possibility would be to just count all ejected students as a “fail” for the school, right?

Then, the incentive would shift to prevent the students they don’t want from entering the school in the first place. Which could be a real pain for the students. But, this does seems like it would incentivize the schools to do what the original poster wanted, check that the incoming students actually learned what they were supposed to.

This already happens — my district when I was in school, and my son's district now, both have / had "alternative" high schools that kids get transferred to when they're struggling. Kids who are dropping out inevitably get transferred as part of the process; the high school they were originally attending has stellar graduation rates. The alternative high school has miserable graduation rates, but no one really cares.

Public school districts cannot expel students in California.

No, but they can transfer them, which is what the comment you replied to was worried about. My partner used to be an elementary school teacher and frequently complained about the school she worked at. The district transferred a large percentage of students with IEPs (individualized education program, a plan for special care/resources for students with disabilities, often related to poor behavior) from other schools in the district to hers.

Her school did not have adequate resources to handle these students, so they always had multiple students with severe behavioral issues that should have been in a dedicated classroom with a special education trained teacher, but were just in regular teachers' classes. Naturally, the teachers were burnt out from working with too many challenging kids they were not trained to take care of and the other students had worse learning outcomes.

> the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically

Top schools aren’t that way merely because of socioeconomics.

Well, depends. "Socioeconomics" has been utterly abused as a concept for political gain.

Are top schools that way for social and economic reasons? I mean what else is there to blame? Are they that way because of being different in the department of what progressives actually mean by "socioeconomic factors"? No, not really.

> This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling.

You're saying that like it's a bad thing.

I'm continuously surprised by how America, a supposed capitalist country is more communist than some communist countries.

I grew up in Romania, after the revolution, but we still had basically the same education system. Even in communist Romania, if you wanted to get into a good high-school, you had to pass exams, and if you didn't perform well in school, you got left behind.

Everyone understood that if you wanted kids to succeed, you couldn't let the slow kids pull down the smart kids.

Measuring (and funding) schools based on student outcome is fraught because a student's performance / preparedness for the "next level" is not entirely a function of the school. There are other significant parameters, including parental upbringing, home life stability, neighborhood safety, friends, hunger/nutrition, various trauma and abuse, the list goes on. I'm sure it's been studied, but I'd bet "school quality" is not even close to number 1 on the list of predictors of educational outcome.

This is true. There are safeguards (that are currently failing) that my program would engage:

- The state is legally required to provide those kids with an education.

- There is funding allocated to help those districts.

If "we will not pay you if the kids do not learn" means there are zero schools in those districts then (1) the state government will get sued for not doing its job (because closing 100% of the schools makes the failure objective and obvious) and (2) it will have to update those funding formulas so that it is possible for some school (state run, or private) to break even while providing an education in those areas.

With sympathy to your appeal that 100% closures will force us to reckon with the problem, I suspect it'd only lead to missing the forest for the trees. This would come with substantial pains to the community. Potentially ones that knock-on to other pains.

You're at the root of why this is a tricky problem to solve. In fact there is no solution, just a wide basket of expensive things we should aspire to do to improve affairs.

What pain, exactly?

- The local public school goes from 80 kids per grade to 40, and a new school opens across the street or just rents an existing building from the existing school district.

- Funding stays flat, and academic performance goes up.

- Administrators get to decide which teachers to lay off, and they will be de facto fired if they get rid of the high performers while keeping the low performers.

- If the union contracts make it impossible to retain the high-performers, then the school eventually shuts down, and teachers that are competitive on the job market get hired by the new school for similar pay / benefits.

- Teachers at the new school get evaluated on whether they do their job, and the new administrators have a strong financial incentive to use performance-based evaluation instead of seniority / nepotism / whatever.

I see no downside whatsoever.

The pains I was thinking of largely occupy the transitionary period of a school closing before alternatives are open.

When does the deficient school close? After this new school is opened? If not, what happens to students and families that depend on an education in the interim?

Who pays for this new school? Must they immediately show improvement or do they get some years to show that their approach is working better?

Will the metrics even be accurate in the new school? Will there be a self-selecting bias in the newly formed student body?

I don't think these details are particularly hard to work out:

- You can shrink the deficient school to zero by reducing teacher count starting in the lower grades and moving up, and by allowing parents to opt for transfers in higher grades.

- The building still exists, so you could reuse it. Or, investors could build a new school. Obviously, there's some lag in the measurement, since it requires a few years of student data. I'd say look at the first and second derivative of the test scores. Note that the claw-back model deeply screws over investors that fund substandard schools. This is likely to create stranded real-estate for the next round of investors to buy at a discount.

- The metrics are produced downstream, so there shouldn't be measurement bias. There probably will be self-selection bias. There are existing funding mechanisms to deal with challenging student bodies. If those are working, then the per-student funding of the old school with skyrocket. If the old school still fails, then that produces a high-revenue group of students for some other new school to take on. If those funding mechanisms are not working, then it creates an externally detectable signal to the outside world that the problem is one level up (no schools in certain areas), making it easy for voters / courts to intervene (currently, those funding mechanisms are failing, and no one is held accountable).

investors? you're going to raise the cost of primary education to accommodate enough of a margin to attract investors? I thought we were talking about public education so that people in our society can at least read - a task that we're doing pretty bad at. The private school system for the 1% is doing just fine already.

I have many concerns with this kind of funding model, but I don't think the measurement problem is so serious. Performance incentives in education typically reward improvement of the student cohort relative to how it was performing the previous year, or even use value-added models that use multiple past years to predict the student trajectory.

It’s also fraught because schools will spend increasingly large fractions of the time preparing kids for tests instead of teaching them anything.

Doesn't this whole story suggest that the aversion to "preparing kids for tests" was wrong? The UC system changed its admissions policies to help kids who weren't prepared for tests, and now they have a bunch of students who don't seem to have been taught anything despite their high grades.

Wasn't this the plot of the Wire season 3 or something?

It is one part of the plot that focuses on inner city schooling in season 4 :)

The heritability of IQ actually changes based on wealth, so its the other way around. A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not. (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14629696/)

A child may have the genetic potential but never reach their potential because of outside factors. One's environment shapes one's brain development.

That's why equity is just as important as equality in education. Equity is understanding that children start from different circumstances and may need specific support to actually reach their potential.

Although the biggest factor here would just be for society to make sure no child has an upbringing where food, shelter, other lack of resources are a problem.

That mistakes the point of education. Schools do not exist to fix every social problem, and demanding they treat fixing every social problem as their number one priority is how we got into this mess of "teach nothing but make sure everyone passes" in the first place.

Yes, but back when California was poorer, it had some of the best schools in the nation. Now that it's richer, the schools are collapsing, so it's really hard to argue that systematic social problems are the root cause.

in comparison to what part of the country because if you have kids, you probably want to be somewhere on the West Coast or somewhere in the northeast if you want your kids to have a better education most of the best schools secondary are in those two areas, and if you are different, speak another language there are whole areas of the country. You definitely don’t want to be in if you have kids.

The only thing that changed is that California got richer, and it just so happens that wealth was evenly distributed.

How convenient.

california spends about ~2.5k more per pupil in low income districts than high income districts.

https://www.ppic.org/publication/financing-californias-publi...

I’m not sure what this has to do with the assertion above.

California is among the US states with the highest income inequality.

Ideally, schools shouldn't have to fix every social problem, but in practice, in modern day America, schools are stuck being the backstop. Schools shouldn't have to provide breakfast to kids, but they do because we keep cutting SNAP and other basic assistance programs. So schools need to pick up the slack, because you can't teach a kid if they're starving.

>Schools do not exist to fix every social problem

By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.

If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.

That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about equity and social problems.

(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)

> schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed

I don't disagree.

But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...

The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.

> every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.

If you’re 18 and can’t read/write/math there is no opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesn’t change that. At some point the child is just out of time no matter the circumstance.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that, "A school shouldn't pass students who haven't attained grade-level mastery," and, "Schools have an obligation to support the development of children beyond their basic academic achievement," were mutually exclusive. I certainly didn't state that.

Not only failed, but then commit a fraudulent activity to cover up their sins leading to a systemic destruction of society and theft of taxes

I said "society" not "schools." No, schools do not exist to fix every social problem.

But my point was that wealth = a child more likely to reach their potential. That's a real gap, and a real social problem that needs addressed, by the powers (government) capable of addressing it.

However, schools do have a duty to provide a safe and conducive environment for education. Many don't offer that. Many have meals that are inadequate, many have a bullying problem that schools refuse to address, many care more about their sports stars than they do providing equal opportunity for education, etc.

> A child from a wealthy family will reach their potential, where one from a poorer family will not.

may not. I’m not just being pedantic; it’s very important to recognize that being impoverished is not the same as being incapable.

But it does mean you’re living life on hard mode.

This is far from proven fact. There are studies that show this effect, and there are studies that disagree. I can certainly see the argument for it being true in extremely Low-SES evnironments, but I don't believe this is true for the vast majority of Americans, and certainly isn't why California schools have such poor outcomes.

Most people are pretty average and plenty of average people make it through a typical Bachelors program just fine.

While there may be some concepts that some will struggle with or unable to handle, the VAST majority of school comes down to the effort an individual puts in. You won't pass with zero effort. Some may be able to skate by with less effort because they can reason better, but in the end it will always come down to effort put in.

If you are not high IQ, that means you need to put more effort if you want to get "straight A's"... it is emphatically not an excuse to give up, not try or lower standards. I say this as someone somewhat high IQ who was a bit lazy and easily distracted in school. There were lots of kids that weren't as smart that got high grades and did well.. because they put in the work. I'm also a bit older than a lot of people here (early 50's).

Okay, I do agree with this. IQ probably correlates with effort a little, but my anecdotal experience is that the most successful people in my school were primarily smart as opposed to being hard workers. Of course, there is a lot of overlap and exceptions.

I scored ~145 on a recent WAIS assessment (with low to average processing scores) and I could train most children to do the same if they started early enough.

That's basically what my upper middle class parents did for me, as the tests were very similar to games I was given since a young age. Of course there are other more important developmental factors like health, stability, and nutrition but those are easier with money too.

Most of HN seem to support a form of modern eugenics.

This is laughable. Most children (sampled randomly from the United States) could absolutely not score 145 on a WAIS assessment. Your perception of the average children's intelligence is likely skewed by being surrounded by above average intelligence children (maybe in school). It's not eugenics to acknowledge the strong genetic factor of human intelligence.

Intelligence is strongly hereditary, I haven't seen proof of anything beyond that.

I attended and have worked in US public schools, so I have a very clear picture of why a lot of students are not performing well.

It's actually zip code.

There's no IQ correlation with zip code? Think again

Almost everything is correlated with zip code, most especially SES, so this comment doesn't really say anything.

This is absurdly problematic. Your solution is basically handicapping the schools with kids that perform worse and then potentially closing them? That doesn't solve the problem, this is just pro-Charter School propaganda that ignores the real-world effects of these positions. You've identified a real issue with the 'equality' vs 'equity' concept, that doesn't lead to 'Close public schools and switch everything to Charter schools', that's an absurd conclusion.

What is your issue with redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results, while allowing school choice for students at the same time? I may be naive but that sounds fairly good

Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias.

It's really easy to have good outcomes when you have the ability to curate your student population. And though charter schools are regulated to make it harder for them to curate their student population, the statistical evidence is pretty unequivocal: they serve different populations than public schools, and their "better outcomes" immediately vanish when you control for that.

So, what is the issue with redirecting funding from sucky* schools towards ones that deliver results**?

* Schools that teach the general population

** Schools that teach a subset of the general population that always does better

> Charter schools deliver results the same way that private schools deliver results: selection bias.

Wasn't there a failing neighborhood school in LA that got turned into four charter schools that basically rescued the district, without removing any students?

The other LA (Louisiana) had lots of evidence to the contrary. If you force charter schools to participate in a lottery, they almost always come up worse than the public schools (there was a single exception).

We saw this happen in Houston. Many of the worst public schools suddenly "improved". It's a miracle! Oh, they did this by encouraging the lowest performers to drop out. Whoops.

And this is before we start talking about all the high GPA students who now all magically need IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) because it gets them an extra 50% of time on their tests. So, now you have your best students loudly (because these parents are active) soaking up lots of resources genuinely meant for your worst students.

I'm not saying that charter schools can never be an improvement, there's probably very few changes to anything for which that can be confidently said, since sometimes systems and organizations get so mired in dysfunction that even a change that's, on paper, for the worse provides the needed stimulus to improve things.

I'm saying that people make claims about the systemic superiority of charter schools that, under examination, don't hold up, and it doesn't make sense to direct extra funding to schools that are already getting better results by making their own job easier. For that matter, many (certainly not all) of the "best" public schools are benefiting from a similar phenomenon, which is exactly why California has its complicated redistribution funding scheme, to avoid rewarding schools with an easy job and punishing schools with a harder job.

And people love to come into a system that they don't understand, regurgitate the most naive, obvious approach that we have specifically moved on from because these systems aren't actually that simple, and think they solved the problem: "What if we rewarded success?" Wow, what a genius, nobody's ever thought of rewarding success, let's call the NYT, let's call the Nobel committee, you've finally solved education, thank god we have you since nobody has ever thought of giving more funding to schools that are already doing well by taking it away from schools with struggling populations. Thank god we have someone here to tell us that we should financially incentivize good metrics, maybe you can solve American health care next, and possibly, if you can find the time, you could address world peace after that.

I don't know, was there? Do you have a link?

Alain Leroy Locke high school. So I don't know if there was any academic improvement, but they was certainly a safety improvement.

Ed (looked it up): there was academic improvement, LAUSD claims it's not enough, LAUSD is comparing against neighboring districts, which were not as distressed at the outset, "18 years to improve should have been enough". Safety is considerably improved. Alumni and district residents seem to want to keep the school. Locke high school is currently going through a charter renewal challenge.

Unpopular opinion: If we have evidence that shows that keeping all the smart kids in one group creates massively better outcomes for that group, then that's something we should be doing everywhere, not something we should ban.

I believe the evidence claimed is that there aren’t better outcomes for smart kids. Schools that claim they have better outcomes just selected for kids that would always have better outcomes. Like if I claimed my basketball team has better outcomes because I got to make sure all my players were above 6 foot. These 6 foot players don’t necessarily benefit from being in a team with other 6 foot players, but I’m saying people should apply for my team because I’m doing so much better than the team that can’t make those weeding out decisions. I’m intentionally conflating the success of my capacity to select for success with my capacity to coach a team.

But surely if having the best possible basketball team is important for national success, then it makes sense to pour more resources into the players with more talent

Yes, but in schools we're trying to get the best overall result, not optimize for one amazing school and a bunch of bad ones.

National success is about creating a nation of basketball players, not just a single all-star team.

It’s not actually that unpopular; there are plenty of gifted programs, though the tide has turned to controversy around them more in recent years.

I continue to believe that gifted kids are special needs kids, and that they shouldn’t be in the same classroom as those who are struggling for all of their classes.

People don’t like to talk about gifted kids, except to imply that being “too smart” is somehow bad or unfair, and I think it does them a disservice.

Gifted kids get very, very bored, and lose interest quickly, when they aren’t challenged.

Taking you at face value, the first step is to address the framing here:

  'redirecting funding from sucky schools towards ones that deliver results'

This is not quite the reality of how this works. What you have to recognize here is that being pro-Charter school legislation means that you are in favor of spending less on public education, and giving that money to private education companies who already charge and make profit.

You are advocating for draining public education. That's the position this takes. And you believe it's better to give it to private education, all for-profit entities. So you have to recognize that the position here isn't "give more money to better schools" it's "give money to private for-profit companies and take it directly away from public education"

  'allowing school choice for students'

This is a talking point that doesn't hold any water. They claim that by giving parents some tiny affordance, that somehow enables them to enroll their children in expensive Charter schools. That's not how that works. What they're doing is giving a very tiny % of the money they are taking from public education, and giving it to the families as direct cash. Why is this a problem? Because the amount doesn't cover tuition. It's not enough. Families in poverty can't afford multi-thousand-dollar tuition just because they got a $1k check in the mail. The math doesn't math. It only helps families that were already capable of affording it, or on the borderline.

But the bigger problem is that it directly harms public education. So then what happens is that public education gets _worse_ at the expense of the people who can afford private schooling.

So all this to say, defunding public schools is not a good position, and they are doing everything they can to try to dress it up and muddy the conversation.

Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.

Are you providing after school child care options or transportation to their school of choice? If not, then it’s not a real choice and kids from lower income households will remain disadvantaged.

That is to say, the results will be mostly identical except now public money will be going to private entities. Because that was always the real goal of charter schools.

> Because it’s not a real choice. As household income decreases, the odds the child goes to the nearest school (regardless of how good it is) increases.

The “odds” don’t tell you whether or not it’s a “real choice.” Families that value education will take advantage of those opportunities. Families that don’t value education will get what they get.

Lots of families don’t value education and there’s nothing you can do for them. My wife is from Oregon, which has terrible test scores. And as far as I can tell, people there simply don’t care about school. Everyone’s dad is a logger or fisherman or something like that, and putting effort into academics isn’t valued.[1] In that environment, the best thing you can do is have charter schools for the minority of families that care. The alternative is to have shitty public schools that don’t serve anyone well.

[1] My wife did so well on the LSAT she got a scholarship to a top 10 law school. But people back home aren’t impressed. That doesn’t matter to her, because she is extremely internally motivated, but most people just go with their social flow: they won’t work hard for achievements people around them don’t value.

Surely it’s possible that a family might value education but not have the literal time, if they are working non stop, to take the kids to a further school? Or to take care of them afterward?

You’re avoiding the point by saying “anyone who cares can,” and avoiding the economics entirely.

Economics can force choices against your own best interests. If you have an hour between shifts and the school is 45 minutes away, you may have no choice.

This is separate from groups of people who don’t value education. This is about where others make that choice for them.

Most people aren’t “working non stop.” Out of non-disabled SNAP recipients with children, only 10% work full time, and only 33% work more than 20 hours a week: https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-f... (table a.26)

Most of the people I know who work two or more jobs also do not get SNAP. Sometimes, it’s pride, and sometimes, it’s logistics.

My sister is on SNAP; it took hours, literally, for me to sign her up, and I’m quite “technically savvy” lol

And every year the renewal takes at least two hours in NYC.

There is so much context here that you’re missing — have you ever been poor before?

Everyone in my wife’s family grew up poor and many still are. My wife lived in a converted barn for part of her childhood.

Regardless, the data is the data! Only 10% of parents on SNAP work full time.

You, personally, haven’t been poor, though, so you you don’t know what it’s like to have to balance all the things a poor person does as an adult. Your confidence that you can speak on this topic because your wife was poor as a child comes from a perspective of massive privilege.

If you had been poor as an adult, you’d know that it’s very difficult to stay on SNAP if you have any income. It incentivizes not working if you want to feed your family.

You mention people who aren’t on disability — well, it’s very hard to get on disability. Go find a social worker and ask. They’ll tell you stories about people living on the streets with diagnosed schizophrenia having to stand in front of a judge for an appeal because SSDI was rejected twice.

What percentage of people who are on SNAP actually disabled and unable to work, I wonder? It’s far high than the number of people who actually receive SSDI.

This is why I ask if you’ve been poor — the devil is in the details on these programs and you are confidently misinterpreting those details.

Data without context is not useful.

  Data (alone) = Noise
  Data + Context = Information
  Experimentation + Error = Experience
  Information + Experience = Knowledge
  Knowledge + Humility = Wisdom

What do you call the injection of ideological excuses into data?

You mean like bending SNAP data to somehow fit your picture of what poor people are like?

Or making wild generalizations about how men in Oregon only work in farming and fishing when those industries actually only comprise less than 10% or the workforce.

I don't think folk should bother debating with this user, I don't think they're conversing in good faith.

It seems like the entirety of his experience of Oregon is within a 10 mile radius of Coos Bay.

Not sure, since that's not what we were discussing.

What wildly inaccurate generalizations about an entire state.

Try being less closed-minded.

> If the charter schools are not producing students that perform well academically, then they do not get paid

Some people have never heard of Goodhart's law and it shows lol. It leads to terrible ideas like this which make the same mistake again and again.

I want you to think -- really think -- about the ambiguities in "perform well academically". How do you measure this? Test scores? Grades? If it's grades, then you've just given everyone at that school an incentive to never fail anyone, no matter what. If it's test scores, we already know that leads to teaching to the test, which hurts academics in general. It massively incentivizes cheating and fraud. It incentivizes kicking out any student who has any problems whatsoever.

For every complex problem there is an solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.

The charter schools will do fine because they will attract wealthy students from all over who can afford to travel farther for a better school. So these charter schools will monopolize public funding for educating the wealthiest students, while poorer students will attend the nearest school regardless of quality and the schools will suffer as students struggle due to issues outside the control of the school (home life, familial financial struggles, etc.) The extremes at both ends will just be magnified.

Schools in poorer neighborhoods struggle because the people who live there are struggling.

The charter school model is attempting to solve the problem in a vacuum, but the problem does not exist in a vacuum.

In your vision how do you force the charters to accept a representative sample of students? Or do you not force them, and allow them to recruit the easy to educate kids and filter out the expensive kids?

One obstacle is geography, and the built environment. Schools are of their communities. Even if you do bus people around, they come home to the same places, norms, and situations; not all education happens in the classroom, and “you don’t belong here” is a thing. The rich schools are in the rich places. The poor schools are in the poor places. The outcomes—often—not always, but often—reflect that. Is a deeply-depressed neighborhood really improved by starving its school? Or deeming it unworthy of a having a school altogether, and emptying its children out to places that “have it more together”?

Another is the idea that schools are motivated by money in the same way profit-seeking ventures are. A company’s shareholders might respond to financial threats and incentives, but the teachers on district-regulated wages? What’s the phrase, can’t squeeze blood from a turnip?

Then there’s of course the construct validity of standardized tests as a measure of “suckiness”—they’re easy to administer at scale and to compare across years and between schools—but do they really capture every flavor of good work that’s done at a school? They’re the best thing we have, but does that make them good enough?

The main issue, though, I think we can frame in terms of a slightly different legibility issue: since the school is the only variable we directly control, we model the school’s “suckiness” as a function of its… what, budget? Staff bonuses? Whoever exactly is it who we’re proposing to punish by removing funds? But just as I imagine we can think of kids who would be fine either way—one of the less provocative stereotypes that comes to mind is that of a Tiger Mom kind of community—we can probably think of kids who won’t be fine. The less provocative stereotype that comes to mind is a child with special needs: with an aide, maybe that child may develop enough to participate in society, and we’re a more humane and moral society for trying. For that matter there are other children who are living and growing up in situations where survival is always going to come before their test scores—and those are probably the students with guardians least equipped to exercise “school choice.” How does punishing their school improve those kids’ outcomes?

Often students who perform poorly need more resources, not fewer.

…are a few of the counterarguments, anyway.

Because the "sucky" schools are statistically where poor people go to school, which statistically is where minorities go to school.

School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.

The people who benefit are not the wealthy, who can afford to simply buy a house in the school district of their desire, but simply middle class parents who care about their kids.

Poor people care about their kids, too. They're just struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates instead of worrying about what college their kids are going to get into.

Assuming we're talking about the US, this is just not true. If you are actually poor, then the government has incredibly generous programs to put food and shelter over your head. Where I live, the city government will literally paid for your daycare and you can enroll in lotteries to buy homes at 1/10th the regular price.

Middle class parents are wealthy compared to the average student of a "sucky" school. These schools are typically the in the poorest areas in the state/county.

I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.

This is slave morality and the logic of ressentiment and envy. It is also profoundly immoral.

Never mind that this approach condemns everyone to a state of perpetual mediocrity, and the poor will always be with us. Mind you, how much you value education is to a large degree a product of the family environment and how supportive it is.

How about we allow excellence to flourish as it does, support it any way we can, and also look for ways to lift those who are worse off out of their condition? The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity", whatever they even mean in real, concrete terms. If we dispense with envy, we focus on objective improvement instead of status-obsessed insecurities.

Of course, I think the most pressing problem in education today is that most "educators" have no damn clue what it even means to be educated anymore. They think they know, but they absolutely do not. It isn't "getting a job", as important as jobs are, or some odd aim of the ideology du jour. Public education in an ideologically-charged society of our stripe is practically condemned to superficiality and poor quality, because all good education begins with an accurate anthropology. We can't even agree on that, so naturally, this produces a lowest common denominator effect. In such a situation especially, permitting a diversity of educational styles and programs is necessary.

And btw, if someone is wealthy enough, they'll move to another school district and make school choice a reality anyway within your regime. People do it all the time. Or would you like a return to latifundia to enforce your vision?

> I am all for helping the worse off. However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.

Bruh. It's easy to prattle on about "objective improvement" and "slave morality" and pretend everything's a zero sum game where funding is fixed and we can do nothing to change the system. Neither is true. This is just an excuse to absolve yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.

> The focus should be on making things better, not bizarre idealistic notions like "equality" or "equity"

Man, does anyone else hear that high pitched sound? Just me? Huh.

Perhaps you should learn to read, because your response (even putting aside the juvenile bits woven into it) doesn't actually respond to it, and certainly not with any real substance.

> pretend everything's a zero sum game

This claim is truly amazing. My post is exactly a rejection of the notion of a zero sum game. How can you reconcile the assertion that you can both enable excellence and assist the poor? Perhaps your aren't familiar with what a zero sum game is.

You don't achieve true solidarity by crippling those better off. In fact, that is what produces zero sum game thinking, because people get defensive, and rightly so.

> absolve yourself of doing any of the hard work to improve things.

What does that even mean? A parent's responsibility is first and foremost to their own children. If you don't accept that, then we have nothing further here to discuss. Children are not the sacrificial lambs of your pet political project.

(I am a bit curious about your accomplishments here, since you so self-righteously demand "hard work" from others. Did you force your own children to attend a garbage school when you could have given them a better option? I suppose that's at least consistent, but it is still unjust and a failure of parenting.)

> However, one of the most repulsive ideas is that you can cripple everyone else, because some people have less.

When did I say that I'm in any way pro crippling other students? I'm simply pointing out the socioeconomic reality of school performance.

Comments like yours are vile. Brimming with vitriol.

False. Charter schools are public schools and often served by school bus routes or other public transit. Walking or cycling can also be options for some students.

The real differentiating factor isn't wealth but simply giving a shit about your children. Parents have to take some minimal effort to enroll their children in a charter school and many simply don't bother.

IME the differentiator is the fact that in most states charters have some way of filtering out the least profitable kids is a huge advantage for them, and concentrates the most expensive kids in the public schools.

It's not just giving a shit: it's also the capacity to act on giving a shit. I'm exhausted at the end of the day after getting the kids to bed, and I'm fortunate to be in a stable marriage, live in a large home that my wife and I own, and work a well-paying WFH job. I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages.

There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design a system that provides a sufficient level of support for those families that only have an average level of capacity.

> I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages

Yes, you can only “imagine” what it’s like for people who are less comfortable than you. But that cuts both ways. It could be that you’re also “imagining” the barriers you think exist to people accessing charter schools. In particular, I suspect you’re incorrectly assuming that people work as much as you do, just for less money.

Actually, I can more than imagine it. I have friends that are in those situations, and help out when I can.

How difficult is it?

1. give a shit

2. enroll

3. ???

4. PROFIT!

Have you ever lived below the poverty line? In order to enroll, you’d have to know about it and manage logistics.

Working 14 hours a day so you can clothe and feed your kid doesn’t leave much time for that.

That doesn’t mean you don’t give a shit.

There are so many pieces of that step 3 in trying to navigate a school system that isn't accustomed to working with lower-income students.

>> School choice is bad because the only people who benefit from school choice are already wealthy - they can afford to transport their child to the school of their choice.

So what?

If "level the playing field" means my kid gets a sub standard education because you have to constantly lower the bar, I don't want to play your game.

This stuff isn't new. Everyone understands the importance of education, and everyone understands the importance of being involved in your child's education.

It isn't about poor and minority. It's about being a good parent.

Some people don't have that ability, and my kid shouldn't be punished for it, regardless of the money in my wallet.

There are plenty of examples of single parent and low income households where they value education and push their kids to doing better.

At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.

Okay but if you care this much about school choice why not move to an area with better schools? That's a tool most people already have.

And yes, most people who are complaining about "school choice" have this tool to some extent. Will your living conditions be exactly the same? Probably not.

> At some point, it has to be about personal responsibility and not blaming everyone else for your failure to be a good parent.

So why don't you take some personal responsibility and put yourself in a residence which is in district for a school that you want your child to go to? Is that not in part your responsibility as a parent? We can both play this stupid game.

That's exactly what my single parent did. Took responsibility for being a teenage parent, joined a trade union, paid more for a crappy apartment on the edge of a good school district, and busted their ass everyday to provide.

I don't see what you're arguing here? You're the only one playing a stupid game.

If school choice is a thing, everyone can choose where they send their kid to school... they don't have to pay more for a crappy apartment on the edge of a good school district.

And to top it off, the only poor people this actually affects are poor people who live in an area where there is an actual choice of schools to be made.

Which means there is most likely access to transportation.

I know, personal responsibility is such a vile concept.

Everyone can be so much happier if they can blame everyone else and the system for everything bad in their life.

You don't live in the Bay Area.

Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying.

Schools are incentivized to focus on struggling kids because test scores are how teachers and schools are evaluated. The kids at the high end of the class are literally ignored. I know this because in my old neighborhood many parents were complaining about this. And then on top of it, the superintendent was begging parents for donations because they didn't have enough money.

I'm not saying it isn't in your personal best interest to consider switching your kids out of public schooling. The problem is that the public schools need to be fixed, not abandoned.

There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"

Fixing public education is the boring, slow, difficult, real-world answer. Privatizing education further is just adding fuel to the fire.

Self inflicted injuries. Bunch of the public schools in large metro areas have removed their gifted and honors programs. Seattle and NY. That will force people into private schools or charter schools. Some districts talked about removing pre-calculus, thats will force kids as well. Dumbing everyone down to the lowest common dominator isn't the solution and public schools should fail if they keep that up. Its banning schools from having separate JV team and varsity team forcing all the athletes into the two teams without looking at ability. Unfair for everyone.

> There's a difference between "I choose to send my family to Charter schools because the public schools are in bad condition" and "we should close down public schools rather than fix them to make room for more profit in the child education industry"

The case for closing down public schools and replacing them with a for-profit child education industry is that it's systematically easier for all parents to get a better education for their children by abandoning bad schools and only paying good schools in a free market, than it is for parents to participate in the mass political process of fixing public schools, which are government institutions intended to serve a broad mass of people.

Also because different parents have different ideas about what constitutes a good education for their kids, different private schools can differentiate themselves in the marketplace by specializing in different styles of education and attracting different student bases; rather than parents having to democratically coordinate to enact the changes they want in the same mass-scope public school system (and fight against rival groups of parents who want incompatible things).

> Schools around the Bay Area are closing, especially in rich areas like Saratoga and Cupertino. That's because parents who can afford it are moving their children to private schools because of exactly what the OP was saying.

It could also be that fewer of the sorts of people who choose to live (or can afford to live) in places like Saratoga and Cupertino are having children at all.

Everyone blames the school. Its the mentality of parents and kids at the schools. Kids go to charter school. 90% of the kids in my 10 years class meet or exceed grade level on the state test. She is surrounded by kids who push her up and parents that push their kids. Teachers care because the parents and kids care. My wife had half hour call last night with my daughters special project teacher because they want showcase the kids work and have the kids give speeches on it.

You don't get that dedication unless you're at private school. It democratizes private education for the masses. Also have lots of volunteer teachers and student teachers from local universities so the ratio is 1 instructor to 10 students. Special project teacher is a volunteer who is earning her masters at Harvard.

It's funnier because it's old, failed policy that they are recycling without being aware of it because they are ignorant. All old things really do become new again.

It's the current set of policy that is failing. All literacy and math score are down across the entire country and theyve been going down for the past 10 years.

It is smartphones and social media.

The decline is across demographics, across geographies, and correlated with an increase young mental health issues.

The answer is staring us in the face, quite literally, as we type this. We put a cheating and dopamine producing machine in the hands of children without any regulations. Of course it is harming their academic performance.

Ask a football coach if there kids are going to play tackle football and you'll be surprised how often you they won't let them. Ask an educator or psychologist at what age they give smart devices to their kids, and I'd guess it is 3-4 years above the median.

The policy doesn't matter when we're actively damaging the brains of children, which are not fully developed.

Did that "old, failed policy" yield better results than the current one?

It's so strange to see this happen in the USA when our education system up here in Canada has essentially the same set of cultural and social values and there's plenty to gripe about but we haven't had the 'levelling' thing. There have been attempts but it has strongly resisted by parents. [1]

I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.

When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/3907781/restructuring-toronto-sch...

I attended a specialized math and science program (MaCS) in the TDSB. It was gutted by removing selective admissions in favour of a lottery, precisely because of the report you've cited.

The "levelling" is real in Canada and good private schools often manage to skip multiple grade levels.

Funnily enough, I've seen the opposite in the USA. My highly driven American friends somehow manage to get entire associate's degrees before finishing high school, which is unthinkable in Canada.

They reversed the lottery thing after just two years as a failure and reinstated the previous policies.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/tdsb-scraps-lottery-m...

> “They decided to put ideology ahead of student achievement,” said Yu. “In reality, it's hurting everyone, including the equity deserving students that are there but [who] would not thrive in that sort of environment,” he said.

In British Columbia there is no special ed and there is no gifted program. It is a total train wreck. After the non-verbal autistic causes everyone to leave the classroom for the 5th time that day it gets really old (I’m not making this up).

I was a terrible student until high school — where I could start entering into college classes and/or skip classes — because the pace was too slow and I got bored and caused issues. Having the opportunity to do advanced classes was a huge gift for me and my peers I no longer disrupted.

> I think there may be more realization up here that "gifted education" is a type of "special" education, in the same way remedial classes for delayed children are. Kids who need spec ed. and who don't get it can have very bad outcomes in life.

> When the topic has come up I've often pointed out that if you are a parent: you really don't want those evil geniuses in your child's class, poking holes in everything the teacher says, taking up all the teacher's time talking about things over your kids' head, and probably initiating your kid into inappropriately adult concepts. Such children need specialists who know how to deal with that kind of abnormality.

YES. I could not agree more.

> ... you can compute a derivative by 12th grade

The fact that calculus is seen by the public as something really really hard needs to be fixed. I taught myself differentiation in 7th and I'm not proud of it because it's not difficult. Maybe the issue is crappy curriculums and incentives putting the best mathematicians on Wall Street rather than in public schools, but there needs to be a cultural push of some sort. I've given a million last minute math lessons to some of my less math inclined friends, and there is no barrier at all stopping people from learning a ton more math than is taught in schools.

> ... some kids are more talented at some things than other kids ...

This idea is 100% true, but I don't think its a helpful idea in the context of making people learn more math. Unlucky people who internalize this idea end up thinking they are innately worse at understanding abstract ideas, and end up not trying that hard. I completely believe anyone capable of doing a euclidian proof in geometry class can read and fully understand the Bitcoin whitepaper - but they don't. And the barrier for understanding Bitcoin is probably lower than geometry.

> Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

This, but at a more localized level by giving teachers bonuses depending on how well the students do in the next grade.

They defined equity as Fair outcomes, treatment, and opportunities for all students.[1]

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/qs/ea/

What is a "fair" outcome?

Is it easier to hold back talented students with a low bar or push untalented ones to a higher bar?

The conundrum of "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" hinges on that core question. It's weird, and possible contradictory, to see a policy claiming to attempt both.

Most would define a "fair" opportunity as everyone getting the same chances to succeed, but a "fair" outcome would segment on merit. If angling towards fair outcomes, there's usually less uproar over lifting the floor (e.g financial aid), versus lowering the ceiling (e.g. limitations on admissions based on ethnic or financial background).

A much better policy would be to raise the floor and not pay attention to equality of outcome.

If the worst school in 2036 California is better than the average school in 2026, then that's an obvious win.

(That goal is completely achievable -- only about a third of California students are grade-level proficient right now.)

Raising the floor is an equality of outcome. It is arguably equality of oppprtunity too, but only when ignoring intergenerational wealth as a factor. Your kids affordíng school is your outcome, their oppprtúnity.

Innocuous at first glance, but you can see how it could be manipulated into justification for banning advanced math classes and other bad ideas.

People have more wildly different definitions for "fair" than "equity".

They can profess all they like to care about opportunities; the actual policies make it abundantly clear that their metric is purely outcome-based instead.

The most important factor isn't the schools, it is the kids themselves.

No. It's largely the environment that the parents create. Which is why the equity vs equality arguments are bullshit. If I can afford to hire the best tutors for my children and sign them up for summer classes as well, is it really "equal" when they dominate the tests and edge out other kids from opportunities? No. It's because of my financial situation and the opportunities we're able to afford and willing to sign them up for which the majority of Americans cannot. But because everyone takes the same test we can pretend it's "equal".

> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."

> Stephen Jay Gould

No one in my friend group got any SAT tutoring yet the worst person was still 95 percentile. The tutoring argument is overblown. Testing is one of the great equalizers. Us nobody suburban kids had just as much of a chance as the rich prep school kids. Despite the fancy tutors we still outscored them.

California used to have the best schools in the country, and roughly a third of our urban population is Silicon Valley. It's home to the largest economy in the US by a large margin, and is one of the richest states.

Yet, somehow, for math:

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

the only states/territories doing worse at math are DC, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Alabama.

I'm not sure what Alabama's excuse is, but the other three entries on that list have obvious economic problems (only low income urban, failed power grid, literally blowing away due to climate change).

Note that with that link you're looking at data that is over a decade old. Alabama is actually doing better than California in the most recent grade 4 math profile. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=...

I think you also named Alabama's problems. It's one of the poorest states and seems bound and determined to stay that way.

True, but I was responding to a comment blaming the children for their under-performance. The funding gap isn't somehow due to those kids not wanting to learn, problems at home, etc.

I am agreeing with you - the funding gap is one of the causes for under-performance.

Silicon Valley is also the place of serious homeless problem. "The economy" as an abstractions is not what matters - the economy here is some people being super rich while others increasingly outside of good options.

That's due to unrelated intentional mismanagement by state and local governments.

Just build enough market rate housing to house the local population, and the issue will solve itself.

"Affordable housing" is a trap for buyers, builders, and policy makers:

- If you buy an affordable housing unit, then when you sell it, you have to charge based on a formula that will be way below the normal appreciation in your area. Basically, the money you put into the house was a sunk investment that's guaranteed to under-perform anything else you could have put it into. You're much better off getting a fixer-upper condo, or just renting + putting the money in an ETF.)

- If you build an affordable housing unit, then the rest of your development project becomes less profitable. Once the project is approved, you're foolishly tying up capital that could have been used to fund additional developments in other states. Also, the affordable housing approval process is slow and politically fraught. While that happens, you're holding a piece of land (and paying interest on it) that might turn out to be worthless, depending on the outcome of local politics. (If you don't believe me, next time you're driving around Silicon Valley, count "proposed development" signs, and categorize them by "badly weathered" or "brand new". "Badly weathered" means someone has been paying a mortgage on the (probably $10's-100's M) field behind the sign for at least a year. They're not paying home mortgage rates for that. It's probably 7-10% interest. That $700K-10M that could have been used to actually build houses.

- If your local government is subsidizing affordable housing, then they're misallocating resources. They could have used that money to expedite permit applications, improve public transit, add bike trails, build parks, increase freeway access or invest in other public goods that make the area more attractive to residents. Those things have a much higher payoff per dollar. Also, the local government has a monopoly on them. By opting to not do them, they are causing economic damage that cannot be routed around by the private sector. Of course, there's also the question of deciding who gets the public funds, and all the corruption and backroom dealing inherent in that process.

Because most of California isn't Silicon Valley.

The good parts of the Bay Area (which also align to where the majority of the tech industry is) have public schools that haven't changed their curricula despite common core.

On the other hand, the rest of California has had significant financial and budget crises and never recovered from the 2008-13 California budget crisis.

My mom's a teacher at one of these schools, we still have friends sending their kids to them, and I'm still in contact with my HS teachers at that school.

In wealthier areas of the Bay like Saratoga, Cupertino, Campbell, Fremont, Palo Alto, Tri-Valley, Lamorindia, etc the school districts are only paying lip service to common core and still teaching as they were during my time.

Most students take multiple AP classes (and the HSes usually offer 15-20 APs) as well as attend the local CC, UC Berkeley, or Stanford to take additional classes.

The schools that are militantly common core and trying to remove classes are also (frankly) in crap school districts like SFUSD or OUSD where school board elections are dominated by local activists who oftentimes don't even have kids but are using the board as a stepping stone into local politics, and due to their reputations and low pay are unable to hire teachers for more advanced classes anyhow.

There's a reason the kind of house that would go for $1.5M in Sunset would go for $2.5M in the Peninsula or Tri-Valley.

I am a teacher and I write education software for math as a side gig, which I must have because I'm a teacher.

It's rare for any teacher to just discard the standards. And anyone who says "common core" is talking about something from 20 years ago. The new math framework--already years old--has sparked the latest wave of UC revolts and NO standardized testing is part of it.

"Common core" is the exact opposite. When people say that they are referring to the standards and the tests that go with them. Standards are just standards you can teach them or not, but the framework, something entirely different, give schools guidance on what courses to offer and how to approach it.

The latest framework poo-pooed Calculus and Algebra for advanced middle schoolers in the name of "equity." And dissing admissions tests is part of this movement, that gave us the "Data Science" class that UCs rejected. That was supposed to replace Algebra 2 and therefore make students UC-ready. As someone who taught that class, I can tell you it was a joke. And it had zero, nothing to do with common core. Finding a way to link it to those existing standards was difficult at best.

And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP. Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open. Sorry.

> And I promise your mom's school at least gives the CAASPP...

Yes, but their CASSPP participation rates have fallen from 95-100% to 70s range as some people started explaining to parents how to use section 60615 to withdraw from CASSPP as it clashed with AP and SAT prep schedules - this is a public school where AP participation is in the 70-90% range.

> Every school in the Bay Area is not not doing that for decades out in the open...

Note how in my earlier response I said wealthier school districts.

This is how it is in the Tri-Valley and richer Peninsula and South Bay school districts. There is some basic malicious compliance with CA standards, but all the households use "Advancement Via Outside Institutions" in 8th grade and get back onto the "AP Calc by 11th/12th grade" track, and most students end up almost entirely taking AP classes by 10th grade so they aren't really impacted by CA standards changes.

Again, you keep using that word. The standards haven't changed. It's not the standard, this isn't about California's math standards. You're talking about standards, but this is about the framework.

Wealth also correlates with higher test scores. Why? because they are ignoring the framework and doing well with the standards.

This isn't about common core and nothing I have said or you have said changes that.

Even San Francisco rejected the basic premise of that framework's approach to algebra. So it's not just your mom's school either.

Anyway, I'm tired of arguing with your mom indirectly. If any other teachers want to discuss this directly and tell me how I'm wrong, please do.

> This solves the problem of trying to use this as a curriculum back door for climate denial and Islamophobia (or whatever the red states are pushing).

Well, my red state public school taught me calculus, algebra, and evolution without making the claim that knowledge is somehow racist. So maybe those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones

> I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

I disagree, and I’m the person who said underperforming kids should be put in work programs or mental institutions (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060371).

I should’ve chose better words, so let me clarify here: there should be tiered schools, all funded in relation to how many students they have. One school for gifted students, one for second, … down to “schools” that teach vocations, then “schools” where students play around and see therapists, both for students who aren’t learning even with an IEP.

This is roughly what some European countries like Germany do. Although unlike Germany, I think they should start earlier and allow movement up for students that show improvement.

Ultimately, no student should be educated below their level. LLMs allow a decent teacher to teach at the PhD level (and IME most teachers are decent, because most become teachers out of passion).

I know many teachers and funding already works the way you describe: the better a school's students do, the more funding it gets (schools also get funding for the number of days the students show up).

What this does is make it so anyone with a pulse gets a passing grade.

What teachers actually want and need is the ability to fail people. At one district the math department wanted to fail a bunch of kids until the principal intervened, saying they should pass more people, and make exams worth less of the grade.

Teachers need the support from the state and the district to be allowed to fail students early in their academic journey so that students can get the help they need immediately and prevent them from reaching high school and still not knowing their times tables.

> if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something.

--

It's not really racial discrimination per se, but there's a strong parental-educational/economic/class element which is still tied to race in the US unfortunately.. It's not reason not to have high school calculus but it's still something to keep in account.

> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

This would absolutely deepen the issue.

Public school has faced various compounding issues over the years related to policies like this. One big example is teaching to the test, diminishing the actual education because the standardized tests are the deciding factor whether or not the school gets funding.

Ironically, it would make it worse because a lot of school problems simply are funding problems. Public schools in wealthier neighborhoods do better because wealthier families can afford to support the children, where poorer areas have way less access. These problems begin to compound.

The SAT thing was pushed aside originally because it was partially an indicator of who could afford tutoring on the specific weirdness of the SAT vs who was on their own.

Kids who grow up poor also tend to have more home responsibilities. Parents may work longer hours(or be a useless deadbeat), kids will have to watch their siblings or take on part time jobs which cut into the time they can dedicate to education.

I do agree that the equity approach is short sighted and the totally wrong approach, but the correct approach would cause riots when the policy calls for funneling more funds to the worse performing schools to stand up tutoring early. Money can solve the issues of "wealthy areas can afford tutoring", money spent on teachers to provide better educational materials, and generally more spent on additional teachers overall, to cover problematic students who distract the rest of the class.

Destroying public school infrastructure due to a systemic problem would be a colossal mistake. All you need to know about adding a profit motive to education can be seen in private colleges, where education often takes a backseat to metrics like research positions, tuition costs skyrocketing, and even more overpaid admins compared to the public sector.

> If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district.

K-12 education funding is strange. It has social welfare like elements like an entitlement, but is provisioned as a conditionally compulsory service like a jail.

It suffers from similar cost/benefit illegibility as healthcare, with its triangulation of patient, provider and payor, only remove decision making from the patient and on the provider side add local politics to upper management and union rules to workers.

Maybe that it works at all is testament to people caring about kids.

"If a local district starts losing funding, then it would have to close / shrink schools, and people from outside the educational system would be allowed to establish independent (secular) charter schools within the district."

There is zero incentive for "people outside the educational system" to do this. Kids will absolutely suffer because of this plan.

The answer to this, like always, is that teachers need to be paid more.

Equality is more expensive. It’s much easier to just cut advanced classes and shove the upper percentile students closer to the average in the name of having equal outcomes for all races.

Similar to other issues in this country, we like to address the symptoms of economic inequality instead of attacking it at the source.

The function isn't "winner takes all". It's a claw back after objective failure.

California already spends tons of extra money on stuff like special ed, and struggling districts. I wouldn't touch that.

So, if there's a high school in a struggling area and it's graduating kids that can't do 7th grade math, then that opens up funding for charters in that area at 150% state average per student, or whatever the current formula us.

Can you share some credible sources on "schools banning calculus"? Googling seems to primarily show up Quora and indeed HN discussions, and no actual policy proposal or news article.

> To get an idea of how off the rails this has gotten, go read up on their statements trying to justify banning high school calculus.

Can you provide a link?

The results were predictable and predicted but politicians, state and local went whole hog on equity. That along with NCLB results on this catastrophe. We’re finally seeing some needed pushback. You can’t just hand out As to everyone and pass everyone as it’s a kindergarten assignment and then expect excellence. You’re teaching people who will become adults and you’re shortchanging them on skills if you don’t require proficiency. It’s also unfair to apt students who put in the time to learn and do well.

I can’t believe they actually went so far as to dismantle the little haven for achievement that was Lowell high school in SF by getting rid of GPA and entrance exams for a few years. Eventually furious alumni got that idiocy overturned but it should have never happened.

We’re also seeing higher ed address grade inflation by capping As at some institutions of renown.

Give the money to the parents in the form of income-adjusted vouchers to spend on education as they see fit.

That creates a market for lemons.

How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?

The status quo says that the schools do not measure outcomes (and when they do, they do not publish it, or publish it on a long delay), so any objective data parents could use is not available.

> How does a parent (especially one that is illiterate) compare between educational opportunities for their kids?

If you have a significant number of illiterate parents they could hardly do worse than your current system!

They can judge by reputation, talking to parents with kids currently in a school, etc. IMO that is better than publishing metrics because then schools focus on the metrics: this is a huge problem in the UK where metrics are published.

In my experience parents (regardless of educational level) make better decisions than the system does, and there is research to back it up (outcomes for home educated kids for whom parents make all the decisions).

Financial incentives can easily ruin something, but it is very hard for them to fix it. I think the best we can hope for is decent financing that doesn't interfere too much, and the rest must be solved culturally. Because the US school system used to work better, and lots of others work well, without any weird financial shenanigans. We should not be so capitalism-brained to forget that financial compensation is not the only lever.

That’s an interesting contrast to what I perceive as an issue where I am.

Where are my kids go to school there’s plenty of classes for gifted kids (as in kids who excel in a traditional school environment). And there’s plenty of help for kids with challenges.

But it feels like there’s really nothing to try to move the needle for anyone else, anyone not super motivated or with specific challenges.

If you doing “ok” nobody cares.

No he hasn't.

> But I also understand that accelerated classes have tended to allocate more resources to students who are already succeeding.

Where does your understanding come from? I'd imagine that educating less-gifted (intellectually or socioeconomically) students would be more expensive. To some extent, I can imagine there being additional costs to providing advanced education, such as if you need to higher better qualified teachers, or if somehow the textbooks are more expensive. And there might be costs in providing multiple tracks, such as having additional teachers, which could occur depending on the number of students. But I can also imagine advanced students' classes requiring fewer teaching assistants, fewer educational commodities (calculators, laptops), perhaps.

Why so complicated? I thought the idea was to rent intelligence from OpenAI.

The revisionism here is astounding. Yes, San Francisco eliminated algebra for all 8th graders in public schools. It was not a simple rename. Parents sent their kids to supplementary private classes that taught the same curriculum as the old algebra class did, and it was not a redundant recap of the new not-algebra class.

I understand the motivation to deny that San Francisco banned middle school algebra: it's embarrassing, and it was disastrous for student outcomes. But it was a very real thing.

(The Lowell debate was a separate thing: should an academic-focused magnet school be able to use a standardized test to determine proficiency? Or should it be a lottery?)

They planned to do it state wide. The ban was blocked. It did not happen.

However, you can read the proposal if you want to see what sort of reasoning leads to "UC is admitting students to STEM majors, then finding out the students are not prepared for pre-algebra".

In countries where students perform better, they do the opposite of your plan. Resources are pumped into the failing schools to get them to do better. You seem to be just arguing for even more privatization in American which is awful, the kids that are failing have parents that won't be paying for good education or setting up schools. They won't bother with it at all if it isn't public and required.

> the kids that are failing have parents that won't be paying for good education

As in, they would be spending their vouchers on things besides education? Because typically when people speak of privatizing education it means creating a marketplace of educators which parents select and buy with publicly funded vouchers.

>Those schools would also not be paid unless the students do well in the next phase of their education

The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.

This has already happened in some places.

The bigger macro economic issues would probably be the collapse of the middle class, rampant housing and food insecurity.

Hirerarcy of needs and all that.

Anyway with The Republicans going out of their way to restrict student visas it's unclear where our next generation of high achivers is going to come from.

We sure aren't raising them here.

> The teachers would just fill in the tests for the students.

Fraud is illegal. If the law isn't going to be enforced, then trying to fix the law is useless.

I agree about food insecurity. Nationally, it's worse now than it was during COVID. California actually made some good progress on that a few years ago:

https://www.cafoodbanks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/SB138...

I haven't checked food insecurity rates since then, but you may have noticed that food collection barrels have become rare around the holidays. At least for a few years, the food banks in Silicon Valley were truck-constrained, not food-constrained, so those barrels weren't worth the effort.

You’re putting a lot of otherwise good people, teachers of low income students, into a very bad situation.

Many would just quit, and among those who stayed what are the options ?

Get fired when the school is shutdown for under performing.

Fill in tests for students.

If we use programming as an example, the best tech manager on earth can’t get a bunch of random people to write production ready code in a month ( maybe JS, but not Rust).

Public schools can’t pick and choose students. Charters sorta can.

If I ran the school system I’d set up *paid* apprenticeship to job programs in high schools. Actually get these kids real careers. You SHOULD be able to afford an apartment with a high school degree.

The people working on this aren't idiots.

There are people who see massive business opportunities for enriching themselves in privatizing the education system. Some of there points are reasonable, and sometimes they are frauds. Either way, they lobby hard and have a lot of generally Republican politicians in their pockets.

Also, teacher pay is terrible in comparison to the job stress and - reasonably and expected - educational requirements.

The education system is trying to deal with a probably that is out of their control, the increasing wealth stratification in the US, while fending off adversaries that with both good and bad intentioned reasons are trying to undermine the institutions of public education.

At the same time, we have a totally new societal threat in social media. If you haven't read "Careless People", read it. You seem societies around the world locking social media away from kids on the advice of professional groups of educators, pediatricians, and psychologists. There are hordes of irresponsible and negligent parents whose kids are barely functional, and working their way through the educational pipeline.

There is no easy fix here that anyone is missing. In a democracy, this is an existential national crisis, as we are all seeing in real time.

edit: don't ask me who is working on this. It just tells me you are unserious and just complaining. Try google. Hundreds of thousands of people are working on this. Please elaborate on your disagreement with teachers groups (NEA, AFT), the prior administration (American Rescue Plan), or the current administration (ECCA). Or disagreements with AmeriCorps or NPSS as private volunteer service groups groups. Or disagreements with private education advocates (CAPE, NAIS). You may not like all the administrators and principals and teachers as individuals working on it in the system, or PTA organizations outside the system. I could go on all day. But these people are all seriously concerned about the problem, even though they may disagree in areas - you are not special in awareness of this issue.

Who's working on this? I think there are some pretty obvious easy fixes, at least for California:

Find a library that still has a copy of the educational plan California used back in the 1970's, and do that.

At the time, we had the best schools in the country. The state is much richer and has much higher income/sales tax rates now than it did back then. I think that should more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster, though it might mean moving some cash around in the state budget.

> copy [the] educational plan California used back in the 1970's

I think that would go a long way.

> more than make up for the Prop 13 funding disaster

Wrong funding disaster. The real funding disaster is Prop 98, which mandates a certain amount of K-12 spending according to "the level of funding in 1986-87, General Fund revenues, per capita personal income, and school attendance". [0]

Specifically, "[...] [T]he Guarantee is in a Test 1 for all years 2024-25 through 2026-27. This means that the funding level of the Guarantee in these years is equal to roughly 40 percent of General Fund revenues, plus local property tax revenues. Pursuant to the Proposition 98 formula, this percentage of General Fund revenues is not reduced to reflect enrollment adjustments, which further increases per pupil funding." [0]

Additionally, both property tax revenues (affected by Prop 13) and general fund revenues are used to fund the LCFF[1], which is big on "equity" and gives schools with high ESL and generally disadvantaged students significantly more funds. It also guarantees funding growth with COLA and population growth adjustments.

Finally, on top of all that mandatory funding, we're spending discretionary funds to more than double outlays on special education vs. FY18-19[0]--which is claimed to be an investment in student outcomes. And discretionary funds for professional development. And discretionary funds to pay staff 14 weeks pregnancy leave. And discretionary funds to give LCFF a nearly doubled "super COLA".

The state doesn't have a funding problem, it has a spending problem. And the result of this unchecked spending growth is that mandatory Prop 98 spending alone is now a record $127.1B vs $59B in 2013-14 and $78.5B in 2018-19[2]--despite a ~7% enrollment decline over that period[3]. Meanwhile outcomes have plummeted.

The education administration mafia has the state over a barrel. Yet somehow most Californians believe that education is underfunded, usually with a dash of "something something Prop 13". But actually the problem is closer to a resource curse. With ever-growing guaranteed slices of the budget and discretionary sweeteners up the wazoo, who needs to actually teach kids?

[0]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...

[1]: https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/lcffoverview.asp

[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...

[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/

> The people working on this aren't idiots.

Which people are you referring to?

> Within the wider historical scope

In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?

Wrong premise. Near-term and historical causes are intertwined, inexorably-linked. Both cohorts are the result of historical racism. Hence,

>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.

I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.

If understand you correctly, your answer to my question would be "never", that is, you would always attribute some blame to historical causes. Okay.

I am left with more questions, however. To paraphrase your final paragraph, you expect that efforts to undo the effects of past racism—those effects which we collectively call systemic racism(?)—is necessary to snip that past racism from the causal chain to present ills. But I'm left wondering if this language of systemic racism is even particularly useful in describing the situation.

That is, it seems the manifestation of this framing is to address these downstream effects (poverty, etc.), none of which are inherently racial, but affect educational outcomes. But it seems to me that framing the problem nonracially and focusing solely on the proximal causes of educational issues has the same (or better!) manifestations as the racial framing.

In short, I feel the systemic racism framing is unproductive, because in a prudent implementation it merely adds discussion of distant causes, while identifying the same social issues to address. In an imprudent implementation, it would not only cloud the field with historical discussion, but distract from important proximal issues which don't fit the historical frame, while at the same time alienating people who feel excluded or infantilized or condescended upon based on their immutable characteristics, which is scarcely outweighed by a possible ethnic rallying effect which could boost participation.

I think I need to provide a concrete hypothetical to tidy up. Consider a cohort of struggling students in Virginia, say, old coal town. The sociologist correctly identifies historical racism as a factor in some of the students' issues. So they... what? Acknowledge it? What for? They begin their real work addressing (somehow, idk) the homework environments kids have, their encouragement to succeed, the parents' support, school supplies, whatever. And race comes into the calculations exactly... never. I imagine it would be very disturbing if it did. "We're gonna help the black kids first because Jim Crow happened and that means they need it more." Well... maybe! Why make the approximation? Just focus on the proximal causes and get a precise prescription, no need for rounding.

I'll assume you misread the thread. You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.

If that's actually what you're arguing, I'd love to hear more (if only for entertainment value).