The big problem is that no one more capable wants to work there.
We have a mild teacher shortage across the board (which may become major with reports of as many as 40% of teachers seriously considering leaving the profession this year). And then in turn, inner city schools are worse workplaces... which attract worse peers... You need a hell of a martyr complex to take this on, and even if you have it you won't last.
And throwing money at comp won't fix this, either: that's not a great motivator to get the people with the passion to fix this.
Yup, but money isn't great at motivating people to work hard; a lot of evidence implies it even does the opposite. And a huge chunk of that money is vacuumed up by administration.
Inner city school systems are great at grinding up passionate personnel, making them quit or just surrender to do things that look good on paper but don't improve anything.
Is it? How do you know? Have you reviewed the budgets? Do you work in education in Baltimore, and thus, have a sense of what an appropriate number would be?
I don't know the answers, but I do know this -- it's a hell of a lot less than what gets spent in the NY metro area.
According to the US Census[1], out of the largest 100 US Public School systems Baltimore ranked near the very top in spending per child (5th out of 100). Baltimore spent $15,793 per child. Only New York and Boston spent considerably more.
Fines and jail time are the "actual outcomes" of truancy charges, and are much more immediate than proficiency tests and graduation rates. You simply can't force people to go to school without also punishing some of the parents and students, who are disproportionately in disadvantaged groups.
In this specific case I didn't any failure of enforcement at all because there weren't any. The school administration just dropped the ball without any explanation and no corrective action against _itself_. I guess tree-jobs-mum doesn't have much time going to school and make sure administration does its job.
We've had years of Obama administration policies specifically designed to prevent enforcement actions against minority students on the grounds of such enforcement being racist. The system is in perfect alignment with the incentives given to it. The problem is that those incentives sometimes lead to outcomes like the case we are discussing.
A new administator or new system with the same incentives is likely going to give the same results.
That would be true if said intelligent people were optimizing exclusively for the metric you're looking at right now. In reality they usually are not, as they are themselves stuck in a system where their incentives are to optimize for things other than their supposed mission statement.
The world is full of tangled messes where everybody is acting with respect to their own local incentives and everyone is worse off as a result
Even the most intelligent person in the world will consistently make false deductions if she starts with false premises.
Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.
Intelligent people correct their actions when they see the results. It is fair to say that there is enough information about "unintended" results by now.
It's not like the systems we're talking about were performing well under Reagan/Bush, under Clinton, under G.W., or under Trump, either..
Truancy enforcement didn't work too well. Whether laxer truancy approaches end up with better outcomes overall is open to debate, but it's not like there's a clear answer.
That's a good point. If this school is as terrible as it sounds, the students probably wouldn't be learning much even if they were in school every day. We need serious reform on multiple axes; reforming one in isolation probably won't help much.
Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...
Yup-- Frequently these classrooms have packets of worksheets thrown at the students. There's a little direct instruction to a crowd that has never learned to accept information that way. If you or I were put in that situation we'd seek to avoid school, too.
And imagine being the one new excited, passionate teacher trying to rock the boat and get some effort. You're upsetting parents who wonder why you're all up in their business and don't understand the value. Your gradebook creates issues for your administrators. Other teachers who have given up react defensively and seek to undermine you. And the students are not thankful, and can be extremely disruptive.
I don't know how you fix it. Project-based learning has some evidence that it can work in situations like this, because it can draw out participation and interest by gamifying more of education. But it's not like a little more PBL is going to make the system suddenly work.
It is usually the parents that are penalized, but that's still pretty devastating to the kids. As for what kind of fucked up system does that, I was surprised to learn that it's something that some progressives have been pushing for[0][1], so I gather that it's a bipartisan thing. But it's fortunately fairly rare for someone to actually be jailed. In my personal experience, it was the threat of jail time that dramatically escalated the stress of the situation.
We have a mild teacher shortage across the board (which may become major with reports of as many as 40% of teachers seriously considering leaving the profession this year). And then in turn, inner city schools are worse workplaces... which attract worse peers... You need a hell of a martyr complex to take this on, and even if you have it you won't last.
And throwing money at comp won't fix this, either: that's not a great motivator to get the people with the passion to fix this.