Reply #172: One of my dearest friends is a Science teacher for DPS at East HS. [View All]

[politicat]

He's been there since before CSAP, and he notes that dropout rates went way up after CSAP. Recognize that he does his best to not teach to the test, and he has every class from an AP physics class (11 students) to 3 classes of general earth sciences (bare minimum required to graduate.) However, the district curriculum managers require a certain amount of teaching to the test, which is a) very boring for the students and b) detracts from the actual education.

He also notes that, since passing the CSAP is necessary to graduate, and since a lot of the kids at East are dealing with poverty, hunger, poor health, violence and other issues outside of school, he wishes that the state would look at rate of improvement rather than absolute scores. Most of the kids in his GES classes hit high school reading about 2 years behind grade level, and they make pretty decent gains over the next several years, but it's not enough to let them pass the CSAP. It's hard to concentrate on school when you're up all night because the people on the other side of the cardboard wall are screaming in withdrawal all night. It happens.

The schools are a concentrated syrup of society's ills. If bad things are going down in the neighborhood, it will show up at school.

The CSAP graduation requirement means that a lot of kids drop out and get a GED because it's a shorter program, with better hours (meaning kid can work and contribute to home, or get out of a bad situation) and no CSAP.

Personally, I'd like to see the CSAP go away and the GED become harder to get. I'd also like to see education based on goal-oriented learning based on research methods and general process rather than memorization. In the real world, we memorize what we need and look up the rest. A child who can use a dictionary does not need to copy out definitions.

As for vouchers, here are the problems I see with them:

1) Private schools are rare. There aren't enough private school slots for the number of applicants as it is. Increasing the number of applicants won't help that; private schools can't expand or issue bonds the way public schools can. So it's an effective sop to those parents who can already afford to get their child into a private school.

2) Private schools are selective. A private school does not have to conform to Title IX requirements to provide an equal and appropriate education to all comers. They can choose which students to take, and they do. Increasing the number of applicants won't make the schools any less selective.

3) Private schools are not monitored to ensure they are attaining educational standards. While some private schools are excellent, there are more that aren't, being little more than non-home, non-professional home schools. A private school only has to hire a certain percentage (usually fewer than 10%) of licensed teachers. Because of this, private schools can and do pay less than public schools, and offer less administrative support to their teachers than do public schools. Thus, the teachers are in a worse position than are the teachers in public schools.

4) Private school performance statistics are skewed. Most students in the US in private schools are from highly educated families, with money and health care, from good neighborhoods with a sense of security. Thus, they don't have the full bell curve of student ability that public schools have to deal with. Also, most private schools require at least a certain amount of parental involvement in the school. Since private schools don't have to accept or keep discipline problems, underachievers, students with disabilities, or students whose parents cannot or won't pay or do the parental duty, they get a better performance score. It's actually impossible to compare performance between a public school and a private school because of the differences in statistics.

5) Taking money from the public schools won't improve them, and since the children who might benefit from a private school won't get in because there aren't the slots, it's a free gift to parents who already have their children in private schools.

6) Most children don't have access to a private school. 70% of children in public schools don't have a private school they could even theoretically attend -- kids out on the plains and in the mountains don't have private schools within even irrational distance. So it is an unfair gift to kids in urban areas and kids with families wealthy enough to go to boarding school.

7) Public education ensures that the populace has a minimum standard of education. I have no children. When I get old, I will have to go into assisted living. I want my caretakers to be able to read my meds chart. Thus, I do not begrudge a single cent I pay in property taxes to support the public schools. It's very cheap insurance against old age and infirmity.

There's a wonderful section on a child's academic success prediction in Freakanomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The things that make a child successful in school are generally not things parents control, but who they are, and academic success predictors are strongly correlated with the characteristics of parents who have the disposable income to put their children in private schools. You should read it.

I am a product of the public schools - I got an excellent education in less than stellar districts because my parents were involved in my education, because I was motivated to work hard and think, and because my education did not end with the end of day bell. (I spent 3 afternoons a week in Catholic education classes, as well as extracurricular activities associated with the public schools I attended.) Even watching the differences between me and my sisters' academic performance is interesting -- my parents' marriage was not happy, but stable through most of my K-12 education, while it was increasingly unstable, and economically perilous while my sisters (3.5 and 6.5 years younger than me) were in middle and high school. My sisters are both equally as intelligent as I am, but their grades and performance suffered as my parents became too involved in their own lives to devote the time and energy to my sisters. My sisters were less involved, and did not have the religious instruction (I have a different father, who is dead, and his family requested that my Quaker mother have me in Catholic instruction. My mother, being Quaker, knew only enough about Catholicism to make sure I went to classes and had a Jesuit advisor/cleric. Fortunately, the Jesuits are big on education.) Those differences made a huge impact on our educational ability.