[sqrt17]

> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile

The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot.

It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they need to become a future surgeon, but school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.

Enforcing standardized testing as a key KPI isn't really the right solution here, but there's enough examples outside of the US how this can be done better than just writing off people as "not worthwhile".

[kwhitefoot]

> school is just very bad at recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who aren't neurotypical white privileged background kids.

It is also bad recognizing and enhancing the chances of people who are neurotypical white privileged background kids.

I went to pretty good primary and secondary schools which actually tried to get the best out of pretty much everyone. Remedial teaching was taken seriously and wasn't just a bin into which difficult children were dumped. But even then the results left a lot to be desired. It's really difficult even in the absence of political interference.

The surrounding society makes a big difference. I count myself as lucky growing up where and when I did.

[chmod600]

"school as the institution taking care of those kids"

But that's the question, right? Are schools facilities for education, or for taking care of kids?

The format is reasonable for education, but not for complete rearing of children. When children, for whatever reason, are not being raised effectively, a classroom is not going to do a great job with education.

[duped]

Both.

The public school system goes behind education because it's the only state service where most children can be reached. They're crucially important for providing food security and shelter to millions of children whose parents can't or won't.

[chmod600]

Aren't those goals in tension? Isn't that a big part of the problem?

[duped]

They're only in contention if we use the same measures for both, which is the root problem imo. In the United States our schools are more than places to expose children to literature, mathematics, and civics. It's a crucial social service and one with massive reach - if you want to affect change for the children and youth of America, schools are the place to go.

The contrary is also true. When we don't effectively use schools as these crucial public services, we wind up with the "school to prison pipeline" as it's called.

In my opinion the notion of "no child left behind" shouldn't equate to every kid going to college or becoming a doctor. We can design schooling metrics better than test scores and academic outcome. Like criminal justice outcomes, health outcomes like obesity, voting or civic participation, or even social outcomes. The goals of schooling shouldn't be wholly academic. That is why secondary education exists.

[chmod600]

It feels like people just aren't in agreement on the goals of school. And without agreement on the goals, it's going to be hard to succeed.

As far as I can tell, in most of the world and for a long time, school has been a place for academic education. Those that could not be educated for whatever reason were dismissed.

The idea that school should be a general social service for children seems popular among politicians and school administrators, but less accepted among parents and teachers. Furthermore, there was no explicit decision to move away from a focus on academics, it just kind of happened. That's not a recipe for good results.

[duped]

It's not an idea, it's reality. Schools are state run childcare and child rearing facilities in the United States. Academics are one of their activities.

[alisonkisk]

Teachers don't like teachers being social services. They are right. That doesn't mean they are opposed to schools providing social services.

Families getting fed at school like getting fed. They aren't opposed to eating.

[tsss]

It's exactly these low performers who never study, are always late, interrupt, and bully who make school living hell for the neurodiverse students that actually try. They can go into a coal mine and move piles of rocks for the rest of their lives for all I care as long as they can no longer disrupt everyone else.

[MomoXenosaga]

In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to.

You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!

[zozbot234]

> Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation.

More likely, segregation happens because parents don't always want the best for their kids. A lot of it is simply self-segregation, driven by varying parental attitudes to education and the like.

[neartheplain]

There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% white in a county that is 17% Asian and 62% white [0][1]. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, another high-performing public magnet school, is 74% Asian while Asian residents make up just 14% of the city's population [2][3].

In my view, there's a degree to which such lopsided admissions represent a greater Asian American cultural emphasis on education (good) coupled with a marginal standardized test score advantage produced by many hours of after-school test prep (bad). As repeated studies have shown, the advantage of e.g. SAT test prep courses is consistently relatively small, but enough of an edge to matter when you're looking at a ~10% admissions rate [2][4]. Not all applicants have parents who can afford or are aware of the value of such test prep, so it represents an uneven advantage. Crucially, this advantage is not inherently racial, but rather an artifact of culture, parental choice, and socioeconomic background. To mitigate this uneven advantage without completely eliminating merit-based admissions, a blurring filter e.g. random lottery might be applied to the top X% of test scorers.

And there is absolutely value in merit-based admissions. It makes these magnet schools what they are [5]. Despite their distorted demographics, it's what enables schools like Stuyvesant to still function as effective ladders out of poverty for many students:

>What makes these schools so good? The general consensus is the academic rigor. But what’s come out clearly in our interviews with Stuyvesant graduates is something arguably more important: a peer-driven expectation of achievement. What Stuyvesant does is take 3,000 pretty bright kids and put them in a building together. Then magical things happen. They push each other, they strive to be like each other, they learn from each other.

>Nearly all of these kids went to college, often selective ones, and most went on to do well professionally. The poorer students became middle or upper-middle class, and the middle-class students often did better than their parents. And they were happy—most (though not all) felt that Stuyvesant had had a big effect on their lives. For instance, Elizabeth Reid Yee, a white 1985 graduate who grew up poor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, fully credits Stuyvesant with keeping her from a life of poverty.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_High_School_f...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_County,_Virginia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City

[4] https://www.thoughtco.com/are-sat-prep-courses-worth-the-cos...

[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/new-yo...

[MomoXenosaga]

That is true its more about economic status now. We have made some considerable progress in opening up the middle class to immigrants.

To paraphrase MLK "judged not on the colour of their skin but on the size of their parents' bank accounts". So many doors magically open to you when your parents have money.

[neartheplain]

That's part of what makes "Asian schools" interesting. Many Asian American students at high-performing US public schools come from solidly middle and working-class backgrounds. Their parents simply chose to invest every cent in their child's education, sometimes at great personal financial risk. Anecdotally, I know one Korean American couple of extremely modest means who took out a second mortage just to get their oldest through undergrad.

To a significant extent, Asian American parents and students have shown that merit-based admissions _do_ work as a socioeconomic equalizer (see above Atlantic article). The problem as I see it is how to replicate this success among other demographics, including white Americans of middle and working-class backgrounds. Another part of the solution in my view is just making more magnet schools.

[rayiner]

It’s not about economic status. At TJ, where I went, the Asian majority is comfortably middle class, but less so than the white kids there. Stuyvesant, despite being 75% Asian, is 50% low income, and eligible for Title I funding a result: https://nypost.com/2014/07/19/why-nycs-push-to-change-school...