TW: Two of the fundamental conundrums in American education- increasing public service union flexibility and addressing the significant disparities in funding across geographies (the 2nd cartoon is from St. Louis, Clayton is an affluent suburb, Festus I assume not so). If and when and probably not before, we come up with viable means by which to improve these two dynamics is when we will significantly improve our educational success rates. 
5 comments:
First, you'd need to find data that demonstrates a causal relationship between spending and academic achievement.
Good luck with that.
See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298es.html
for a pretty spectacular demonstration of the effect of spending.
What you'll probably be able to find is correlative data because areas where there is greater spending (e.g. affluent tax bases) are areas of significantly different demographics. Families and their priorities look different in wealthy areas than they do in poor areas.
School reform can't happen until we acknowledge that money can't help. The reform needs to happen in homes first.
(And not just the impoverished ones. Those affluent homes I mentioned are often pretty messed up, too.)
"School reform can't happen until we acknowledge that money can't help. The reform needs to happen in homes first."
Extremely broad statement.
Education has so multi-variate that folks can easily just fall back on their biases.
The study u reference is one of many with varying results.
I certainly do not claim to have the answers. And agree $ is not the complete answer.
But if one thinks districts spending 2, 3, 4X other districts create no advantage relative to those in other districts then I intuitively disagree.
Do any of the parents in the affluent districts want to test your premise on their kids by having their kids educated at the .25, .33,.5X levels of kids in less affluent areas?
Then when one says "fix the family", what do u do to fix the family whatever that means (especially since most of the folks supporting this approach do not want government "messing" with families) and more importantly if the kid is born or raised within a bad family what do u do with the kid.
"But if one thinks districts spending 2, 3, 4X other districts create no advantage relative to those in other districts then I intuitively disagree."
That's my point. The conventional wisdom/intuition is wrong about this. Like I said: try to find a study that demonstrates a causal relationship between spending and achievement.
And education/how to reform it/what kind of reform it needs is itself a broad concept. But we know a few specifics about it:
1. Increased spending per kid doesn't produce greater achievement. Not sure what grounds you'd have to dismiss the findings on the KC example. If money were going to work, surely, THAT much money--which bought not only materials, facilities and a smaller teacher/student ratio (all 3 of which are oft cited as "the thing we need to improve)--would have produced SOMETHING.
2. We have seen examples of charter schools--in Philedelphia, for instance--that a) do not select out their students (overcomimng that common objection from the teacher's union) b) spend nearly half what the public district spends per kid and c) see greater achievement.
We should be looking to them for the winning recipe.
Key ingredient: mandatory investment from parents. They have to volunteer a certain number of hours in the school and have to come to meetings.
Now, this isn't causal, either. But it's correlative. The parent who is willing to show up at the school a few times a month is a parent who sees the importance of education in his kid's life. And the very act of being involved communicates that priority to the kid.
This is part of what I mean by "reform in the home"--what is important to a child? Well... That's mostly predicted by what the parent/guardian teaches that child to value.
Part II:
3. Speaking of predictors: What is the *sole* commonality among National Merit Scholars? (Those who scored among the highest on SAT's)
Not race, not money, not location, not public/private/homeschool/charter, not gender, not student-teacher ratio. . .
They ate dinner with their families 3 times a week or more.
4. Mandatory school year is 128 days (here in Colorado, anyway). 8 hours in the school.
128 X 8 hours = 1024 hours
The remainder of the year is 237 days, 16 hours left.
237 X 16 hours = 3792 hours
And that's not even counting the thousands of hours spent in the home before being of school age.
How are teachers supposed to compete with that?
Even if there's lip service paid to the importance of school, how many hours is the TV on at home? Are there any books there? Has anyone ever read to the child? Is there a quiet place to do homework? Does the child feel secure, not only for his own safety, but in the stability of his family?
What can an Olympic sized swimming pool (see the KC case again) do to mitigate against any of this?
5. Finally, as to the challenge of parents testing the money thing on their kids. . . To begin with, all your test does is confirm the conventional wisdom that I'm challenging. Yes, a lot of affluent parents no doubt think that dollars=achievement.
But a) You've got all those parents who pay their own money for private tuition to religious schools. Catholic and Lutheran schools spend far less per kid than their public districts, and yet plenty affluent parents pay for the privilege to send them there.
and, my favorite, b) We homeschool families are glad to have far less spent on our kids. In fact, I spend about 5% of what my public school would spend on Gemma's education.
Is homeschool a lot different from institutional schools? Yes. That's the point. Dollars don't equal academic achievement. Whatever solutions we look for should be looking towards all the other factors that play into education.
And the kid's family must be chief among them.
As to how to "fix the family"--your term, not mine--again, it's the liberal in you that immediately thinks this must be the job of the government.
In general, school districts should be privatized--make it all modeled on the charter school, let each school determine its own most effective incentives for getting parents involved. Incentives for parents to take their kids to the library.
Perhaps make it a requirement that all parents receiving fiscal aid for being out of work attend school themselves for basic literacy equipping or for job training, and, ideally, make those classes available in the same school building as their children attend.
Have the President give an address to students telling them that school is important. :)
(I'm among those who think this was a good idea--hope the speech went well.)
This is already way too much, so I'll stop here.
Except your final question: what to do with the kid whose family sucks and isn't going to get better. . . I don't see how spending more money on him is going to help him.
I do not accept your premise that spending has NO impact. I did a quick search I can see many studies popping up which seem to show a positive link but my bandwidth is not such that I can assess them.
Regardless I said from the beginning I do not think $ is the answer or at least complete answer or even most of the answer. I fully agree parents and other influencers have a tremendous impact.
So lets equalize spending across districts then go from there on things like:
1) having kids spend more time in class/school (which addresses some of the disparity between "school" time and "non school" time)
2) developing programs to help both parents and kids
But what if the parents do not want to get involved or realistically cannot replicate the Cleaver/Huxtable household?
Of course spending is not going to be equivalized nor are school districts going to be privatized via some libertarian fantasy.
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