[julianeon]

> 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".

[Bratmon]

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.

[mswphd]

"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.

[ajsnigrutin]

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.

[procaryote]

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

[smileson2]

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

[HelloNurse]

[flagged]

[SpicyLemonZest]

I just don't see how it's possible to construct a classroom environment that can simultaneously serve an 8th grader who's ready to start learning algebra and an 8th grader with dyscalculia who struggles with basic arithmetic. (I'd be sympathetic to "let's try our best", except that people often propose to try our best by declaring that first kid isn't actually ready.)

[MattGrommes]

I've always thought we should get rid of grades altogether. There should be curricula that builds upward but if a kid masters 4th grade math, they should move on up right then, not wait for half a year to join 5th grade or have to retake 4th grade. Obviously there are operational challenges with this but it's got to be better than having bored advanced kids, the shame of being "left behind", etc. The kid with dyscalculia should be able to move at their own pace.

[actionfromafar]

But maybe they don't need to attend completely different schools, either.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I agree, but I don't think that's what's being proposed. Many special ed programs today work on that principle: try to mainstream everyone in the classes they can be, run separate classes for the cases where that won't work, and everyone kinda understands that the participants in special ed aren't expected to be as successful in their educational pursuits.

[tash9]

As a parent of a kid that has special needs (at a minor level), there really is a separate set of skills needed to teach to these kids, as well as needing a better student teacher ratio. It made a huge difference for my kid.

[bmn__]

> What sad place do you come from?

Do you have an actual argument? Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.

Reality check: in most countries, if you made a public demand of effectively depriving the disabled of the proper care they want and deserve, they would regard you as an inhumane monster, and the education ministry would refer you to state prosecution for violating the constitution.

[throwaway27448]

> Shaming tactics are ineffective on HN.

Regrettably. A place where money rules and brains die

[Bratmon]

> What sad place do you come from?

The American public education system

[tracker1]

Do you want to get rid of "advanced" course options and push every student into the same bucket?

[throwaway27448]

I'd be fine with that. It would provide an incentive to care about the bottom 75th percentile along with the spoiled rich kids

[ofjcihen]

Just FYI I was dirt poor and from a crap neighborhood and qualified for and benefited from these AP classes. Not all kids who succeed only succeed because of their background.

[tracker1]

Similar.. not dirt poor, but bottom 1/3.

[throwaway27448]

I am from the same situation. I speak from experience: social mobility in public school is the exception. I would have done just fine without AP classes at all, as I am sure you would have. It's the kids who need help that benefit from school.

AP classes exist to pad the resumes of rich kids and justify their being propelled into academic situations that should rightfully belong to others. Prove me wrong

[ajsnigrutin]

That's horrible. Smarter kids could get a better education, but they can't, because the teachers have to deal with illiterate kids that don't want to learn in the first place.

[throwaway27448]

Maybe if we tried to educate all our kids instead of just the rich ones they wouldn't be illiterate

[tracker1]

The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level. Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.

Beyond this, the entire point of higher education is to push those who are able to higher levels, not to drag the 75% along for the ride.

[throwaway27448]

> The bottom 75th percentile don't advance humanity to nearly the same level.

Who do you think produces all the value in the world? It's not the people organizing the labor, it's the goddamn laborers.

> Do you think you'd have the internet or iPads if everyone was capped to the 75th percentile? No.

What do you think we would be eating if we left the world up to the rich nerds? We would have starved many millennia ago.

[daedrdev]

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

[wisty]

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.

[ajsnigrutin]

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.

[zozbot234]

> 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.

[bee_rider]

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.

[ryandamm]

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.

[hedora]

Public school districts cannot expel students in California.

[toshinoriyagi]

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.

[rayiner]

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

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

[Levitz]

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.

[xdennis]

> 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.